Teaching English to MNC Workforces: GlobalEnglish CEO Deepak Desai (Part 4)

SM: When you enter a global corporation on a local pilot program, how big are those deals?

DD: The pilot can be a two to three months for a couple of hundred employees. We are not trying to prove the solution works, because we know it works. We just have to prove that it works for them. We know that if we do it right, we can accomplish that.

SM: What does a 100-person solution cost?

DD: The list price is about $500 per person, per year. That changes based on volume and length of the deal. Some customers do multiple-year deals. It is a yearly subscription, but typically companies want more time than a year because it is very hard to learn a language in a year.

SM: When you started selling this to corporations, which were your early adopters?

DD: HP, Proctor & Gamble, and Deutsche Telekom. In the United States the challenge was not e-learning. The problem was that companies there felt that all of their employees already spoke English. In Brazil, China, or other parts of the world the opposite was true. They had an obvious need for English education but were very skeptical about the effectiveness of online education.

Over time, we see that as people get more comfortable, the adoption rate changes. It is all about return on investment. We spend a lot of time measuring. When people come into the program they take an assessment. We then measure the amount of time they spend on the service, which pieces they re-take, and their improvement in English skills. What is even more important is their improvement in productivity.

SM: It seems that productivity would be very hard for you to measure.

DD: It is very hard to measure. We do surveys where we ask users about their satisfaction, but also about how many hours they have saved after using GlobalEnglish. We have found that 71% of our customers report 1 to 2 hours saved per week due to an improved ability to do their job and communicate. Our goal is not to make you so proficient in English that you are able to read Shakespeare. It is about being productive on the job. A lot of our curriculum has evolved over time to be work-based. It is not just business English. It is the notion that you can go to a learning situation and then come to work and quickly apply it. We had to do it in bite-sized pieces; learn, apply, practice.

One example of that is our writing center. Let’s suppose you are going to write an email to somebody and you are not quite sure how the email should be phrased. You can get a relevant template of a typical email from the writing center, and if you like it you can press a button and that email draft will be pulled up in outlook. These are tools that can help you to do your job.

SM: What about spoken English? A lot of countries, including India, are good at written English but are poor at spoken English.

DD: That is why technology is the savior. The 2 billion people learning English have extremely inadequate methods for learning spoken English. That is because the teachers cannot speak and listen. Our service has a lot of speaking and listening interactions. You can record your voice and play it back.

SM: I use the Pimsleur system for French and Spanish. It is actually very good. French is a very difficult language, but the system works well.

DD: It is hard to learn and the reason for that is that every language has so many unique sounds. When you are child, those sounds are embedded within the brain. As an adult it gets hard-wired in there. That is why the L and R are so difficult for the Japanese and Chinese. They have a hard time distinguishing one sound from the other.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Teaching English to MNC Workforces: GlobalEnglish CEO Deepak Desai
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