Sunshine, water, belly laughs, fresh air, running around, sleep.
Some of life’s single ingredients which solve mountains of problems.
Has anyone told you the vital one for business?
As it’s communication, let’s keep talking!
By focusing solely on communicating effectively we can make all corners of our Contact Centre more efficient, more cost effective. Equally, if we neglect our content and our customer touchpoints, our operation will creak under the workload.
Effective communication is our golden ticket; it’s a universal language capable of streamlining our channels and operations: reducing secondary contact, improving self-serve rates and removing agent workload. And here’s the magic – once we know how to apply the principles of effective communication to one platform, there’s no reason not to translate the same principles to another. Humans don’t speak in ‘email’, ‘SMS’ or ‘online FAQs’ – these are simply vehicles for interaction. The language and style in which we communicate is far more fundamental.
Also, great news! It’s perfectly feasible to roll out communication techniques across our internal communication, as well as external channels. Naturally, this efficiency in-house nurtures agent effectiveness and releases agent time.
When designing our Customer facing Output (CFO) it’s important to remember communication has a shape as well as a sound. Rather than just focusing on language, phrasing and terminology we can look at how that language is presented to a customer. If it’s in written form, such as in an email, is it as digestible as possible? Have we sub-headed? Are our paragraphs a touch indulgent and bordering on short novellas? If so, we need to get cutting without losing important content. We might all have a book in us, but not everyone wants to read it.
Simplicity is enchanting when it comes to communication, but it often gets overlooked. Just because we’re at work it doesn’t mean we should use the longest words we know. Simple works. Plain English works better. There’s a time and a place for elaborate vocab, and it’s not on our Chatbots.
Whilst we need to be Masters of Communication, we also need to accept our customers may take persuading to join the conversation. We need to reach out to the skim readers, the scrollers and the small print sidesteppers of the world. Spoiler: that’s everyone. As interesting as we’d like to believe we are, our beloved customers could plausibly be swiping on Bumble for their next match while we’re talking to them. We need to become more than a tab, pop-up, or background noise in their lives, and make our communication at least as engaging as that potential date in Kettering. As contact centres, it’s our job to be a presence worth listening to. Once we’ve done that, we’ll see valuable returns with soaring self-help rates, tumbling secondary contacts and oh-so-impressive NPS scores.
We’ve sussed communication is the simple ingredient of an effective operation. That’s half the battle. But if you want us to fight the war and ensure effective communication streamlines contact right across the board, all you have to do is ask. We’re very easy to talk to.
Now, go and get yourself some sunshine.