Day 28 (25 Nov 2022)

Today, I am going to conduct my first kick-off meeting with a client representing Accurus Ltd, it is a Taiwan company and a subsidiary of MiTech that is also BDO’s client. I spend the whole morning preparing for the meeting, I did is I go through again the information request list to ensure I can understand what things I really need from the client, I watch some of the recording videos to see how my colleague present the information request list, what are the specific terms they are using and what kind of common problems that I can expect it will be asked by the client.

The time has come, I then moved to the meeting room together with Kar Enn that will be going to assist me. I prepared myself and set up all the things, then client join the meeting and I start to greet them and introduce myself, the client then asked whether I can speak Chinese as some of his colleagues are not able to understand English, out of a sudden, I was shocked as I didn't expect this will happen but steadily I replied client that I can speak in Chinese then I proceed the whole meeting with the use of Chinese, one thing is challenging is all the terms that I went through and studied are in English, so a sudden shift to Chinese might be a problem for me, luckily I have Kar Enn with me, as Kar Enn also deal with this situation before so for the specific term like superuser, user access matrix, he is able to help me to translate to Chinese. I begin the meeting by showing the information request list and presenting one by one to ask the client to provide us with the document we required, at the same time I jotted down the client’s response and marked down which are the documents client can give us and which is not applicable. The client was nice, he listen patiently and also reply me accordingly. After finishing presenting all the items, I then end the meeting by asking whether there is any question from the client's side or any doubt client would like to clarify with our side. Then we end the meeting and I continue to update the information request list and email it to the client.

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Main things that have learned

• Conduct first kick meeting with Taiwan client

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Comment/idea/opinion

Today's encounter let me know that actually not all clients are using English as the communication language as for this time when I met with a Taiwan client, they are preferring to use Chinese, so it was an eye-opening experience for me today to conduct a formal meeting with an international client using my mother tongue language.