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Westpac's workforce is more culturally diverse than the broader Australian community.

Julie Edwards and the team at Marrickville branch, NSW, exemplify what can be done to use this diversity to our advantage when it comes to looking after customers who come from diverse backgrounds.

A basic diversity principle is to align your employee base with the customers you serve and with the make-up of the wider population. When we discovered our workforce is more diverse in terms of cultural background and language fluency, we realised this was a great opportunity to use our people to make our products and services more accessible to non-English speaking customers.

Cultural diversity is a feature of our workplace just as it is a feature of the Australian population.

But what does it mean in practice for a bank and its customers? Cultural diversity means people coming from a different background, race or ethnicity. The differences encompass all of lifestyle, values, beliefs, ideals and practices, race, ethnicity, national origin, language and religion.

Westpac's 2005 Staff Perspectives Survey had shown us that over 55% of employees within the sample had a non-Australian background, compared with 22% of the general population in the ABS 2001 Census; and that 32% of our employee sample were fluent in a language other than English; compared with 16% in the 2001 Census.

This year we looked again at what we were doing to meet the specific needs of customers from diverse cultural backgrounds – and how we could make better use of this multicultural talent within our own branches. In particular we looked at how to make better use of our people's language skills.

We started by asking our employees within branches about their own experiences – what this means in practice. We found that Julie and the team at Marrickville branch in NSW are a great example of taking some pragmatic steps as well as drawing on their own multicultural make-up to better serve local customers – and that this feeds through to above-average customer experience outcomes.

Julie and the team have learned that when it comes to dealing with customers for whom English is a second language, a greeter who speaks their language makes a great introduction; that visual tools make explaining products and procedures much easier; and that giving customers time to read brochures makes sense when people are often more comfortable reading than speaking.

It is a legal obligation and also simply great customer experience to ensure that customers fully understand any transaction before proceeding. To achieve this, an obvious solution was to assign our multilingual staff to the areas with most demand for their language skills – so we can explain simple or more complicated financial matters to customers in their own language. But this apparently simple initiative hid some practical difficulties.

For a start we have a way to go to get appropriately trained and accredited employees with the right language and banking or financial planning skills into these branches. Once we resolve this issue, we will turn to the specific challenges around the translation of complex banking transactions. This is especially important in the financial planning area where customers' wealth and financial future is entrusted to us. We need people who can discuss financial planning with customers in their own language to ensure an accurate and complete understanding of the products or services, as well as the risk and financial impact of their decisions.

So we are working to meet the skills gap. And whilst it's the right thing to do, it will also provide real business upside. Our Multicultural Marketing area has identified 42 branches with the most potential for business growth from culturally diverse customers, and where, when it comes to money, customers really will be able to speak the same language with a Westpac person.