The Importance of Effective Communication and Effective Listening in Customer Care

Communication has been a business buzzword forever.  You can go back in history and find diatribes by businessmen on communication as far back as the great Roman and Greek civilizations.  Obviously, it must be a very important aspect of business as well as everyday life.  The irony lies in the fact that many, many businesses never train their employees in how to effectively communicate with other people.   Not only is effective communication ignored in the workplace, it is catastrophically ignored in the area of customer care.

Wikipedia’s general definition of communication is, “Communication is the process of transferring information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium in which the communicated information is understood by both sender and receiver.”  This simple definition describes the rudimentary act of communicating, but could never in a million years describe the complex act of human communication.   Humans communicate with each other in a myriad of ways and over many different mediums.  Almost all college degrees require some study in communication.  Although (in my experience) the general studies college communication classes miss the mark (that being to teach students how to communicate in the college environment in which they find themselves), at least degree curriculums realize the importance of some kind of knowledge of communication in everyday life.  I believe that the general public is by and large uneducated in the art of communication.  A standard model of communication might look something like this:

Information Source>>>>>>>Transmitter>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Receiver>>>>>>>>Destination

          (message)                       (signal/received signal)                 (message)

Believe it or not, this model is a derivative of Shannon’s model of communication which was introduced in 1948.  Yes, 1948.  Communication models haven’t changed much in many, many years because the models themselves are somewhat timeless.  This is because human communication at its basest levels doesn’t change much over time.  With the addition of email, the internet, video conferencing, and the many technological advances in the last twenty years, one might think that the models themselves might be antiquated.  This is simply not true.  Basic communication involves a sender, a message, a receiver, and feedback.  That’s really all there is to it.  Or is it??

How many times have we had an argument with our spouse or significant other and one of us insisted that the other said this or that thing that we really can’t remember ever saying or even thinking.  Communication, unfortunately cannot really be defined by a model, it is a living breathing thing of its own that is constantly changing and constantly dynamic.  What people actually “hear” oftentimes may not be what was actually “said” or intended by the sending party.  I believe this anomaly occurs because in many instances of communication, people “hear” what they want to hear; they interpret based on their prior experience and based on their perception of what was said rather than on what was actually said; selective hearing at play, indeed!

When I was a drama teacher, one of the hardest concepts to convey to my drama students was the dynamic nature of how a play communicated to the audience.  Theatre is a dynamic medium.  Each and every audience member reacts to the play, whether it is a comedy, drama, or musical, in unique and personal ways.  Every audience member brings their own personal experiences into the theatre, and their reception of the “communication” being offered from the stage is determined by how they “personally react” to the action on stage.  This is why live theatre must be rehearsed well and the actors must know exactly what they are doing line by line and stage cross by stage cross because the reaction will never be the same from night to night.

We did an outstanding production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”  I was able to assemble a cast of actors who were exquisitely fitted to their parts and the production was incredibly well received.  I use this as an example because the personal experience of the attendees was such an integral part of the success of this play.  What I discovered through this production was that the older audience members who remembered the actual events were so moved by the production that they were often beside themselves with emotion.  The younger members of the audience, although they liked the play weren’t nearly as moved.  I also noticed a full spectrum of reaction throughout all of the audience members which I contend was triggered by their own experiences.  Whether it was response to the absolute inhumanity of the situation, or response to some sense of their own lost youth, reactions were different.  I firmly believe that each and every person who saw that production had a unique reaction to it based on their own personal experiences in their life.

This is the secret to learning how to communicate with humans.  Each and every encounter is unique.  It is impossible to solve customer care problems off of a script.  Employees must be trained to apply this philosophy of “uniqueness” to their everyday dealings with clients.  One of the best “life lessons” my dad ever taught me was that almost every time that someone gets mad at you, it has nothing to do with you or the situation you were in with that person.  There is always some underlying reason why people get angry and it generally has nothing to do with the present situation.  And indeed customers often do get mad and the employee gets flustered but if they are trained to understand that the customer is not mad at them but at the situation and trained to placate them instead of returning fire, most situations can be defused efficiently.  If customer care representatives and employees who have face to face dealings with customers can understand this concept, it will make their jobs ever so much simpler.

Intertwined with knowing how to communicate with people is being trained in how to listen.  Listening is so vitally important and, I fear, is the most lacking element of effectively dealing with customers.  Most of us fail miserably in this area.  Most of us rarely really listen to anyone.  Many of us find ourselves creating our responses in our minds rather than really listening to what someone is saying.  This is true, I believe, in casual conversation.  It takes a great deal of effort to really “listen” to what other people are saying.  Think about how often our minds wander and we can’t really remember what was being said to us when we are engaged in conversation with another person.  It happens all the time.  This is because we haven’t trained ourselves to really “listen” to what the other person is saying.

One of the hardest skills for actors to master is the art of listening when in a play.  Great actors do their best acting when the other actors are speaking.  Make it a point sometime to watch your favorite actors when they are not talking.  You will find that the good ones will always appear to be engaged even when they are not speaking.  I beat this into my drama students and they were very good at staying engaged in the scenes when they were not speaking.  Probably one of reasons it was so important to me was because of how bad I was at it when I was high school.  We did a production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” when I was a junior.  I was one of the leads in the play and during the courtroom scenes; we had to watch the trial and had no lines.  I was a rascal and did everything in my power to “NOT” pay attention in those scenes.  In retrospect I am truly ashamed for my behavior, but I think as I continued my training in college and became a teacher of drama that my shenanigans were greatly responsible for my insistence on my students learning this very important aspect of acting!

One on one effective communication and effective listening is “constant” in achieving Consummate Customer Care!  Achieving this goal depends so greatly on management listening and communicating with employees in order to teach them to listen and communicate with customers. (I could not have possibly taught my young actors this important lesson if I had not listened to their input and allowed them to communicate with me.)   This is such an urgent concept!!  Who listens to anyone who basically says “do what I say, not what I do”!  No one does!  Therefore, if management does not listen and communicate well with their employees, the program of “Consummate Customer Care” really never gets past the rule stage!