Seneca Services

Seneca offers the following services to its clients:

Language Training :

We take inventory of our clients needs and create a customized program to help our clients achieve their goals. We provide language training in English, French and Japanese, all based on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs methodology. We offer extensives, intensives, and specialty workshops.

Specialty Seminars:

Grammar and vocabulary alone are not enough for demanding communication challenges. Our clients use our special classes intensive seminars to increase their effectiveness in communication and broaden their business skills in specific domains.

Customer Relations :

We help our clients in the hospitality, tourism, travel and security industries increase the quality of customer service.

Our most popular speciality workshop is "greeting foreign guests". Staff may have excellent English, but they lack certain key concepts that are expressed in set phrases and words that increases the politeness level from friendly and familiar to elegant and welcoming. This is crucial for star ratings and guest comfort. We do extensive role play and practice as we train staff in the delicate art of "up-selling".

Sales Skills :

A salesman may speak adequate English, but closing the deal will require more than just persistence. A salesman needs to understand the prospect's expectations use the right technique and language to close the deal. Many techniques are culturally dependent.

Public Speaking :

Sales presentations, chairing a meeting, quarterly reports, roadshow for investors, press conference, conference calls. We train, rehearse, and drill our clients to prepare for all these situations. Our public speaking coaches help write speechs to persuade and entertain an audience. And they train speakers to use effective gesture, voice, and facial expressions. We prepare our clients to deal with situations where they have to speak improvisationally whether it is in front of 30, 300, or the television cameras.

Intercultural Communication and Leadership :

We conduct seminars and workshops to help French and other nationals do business with Americans. American business culture and practice is different from France and Europe. We help our clients become aware of the the culturally based assumptions and expectations they unconsciously bring into business settings. First we help our clients to understand what makes their own culture unique. Second we show how those unique aspects act as a lense for interpreting the actions of people in other cultures. Third we look at other cultures, and fourth we see what happens when the two interact. As part of this seminar, we do leadership and teamwork exercises and role play for negotiations, recruiting and interviewing, counseling and year end reviews.

Our leadership and teamwork seminars are based on the research of Clint Sidle, author of the book, the Leadership Wheel.

Negotiations :

In business and life, most all interaction is a form of negotiation. There is no better way to become a better negotiator than to practice with feedback on our performance. Feedback you rarely hear is, "Yes, you could have gotten more money, if you had only asked." We help our clients understand cultural cues, and we examine how to create the structure for win-win situations that encourage profitable long term business relationships.

Translation :

We have top translators in all most all fields of business. When it comes to translating marketing and sales materials into English, you need more than just language. You need flair and industry knowledge.

Phone lessons :

We work by phone with some of our clients because either they communicate frequently by phone (one-on-one and tele-conference), or because their schedule allows them only 20 or 30 minute windows for lessons.

We used internet based grammar and vocabulary exercises and multimedia news programs about business and politics for discussion topics.