Posted by admin | Posted in Leveraging Technology, Personal Insight | Posted on 10-12-2009
Do you ever get a voice mail with no message except “Call me”? The person who gets this message is essentially walking into a dark room where there could be (a) a dozen roses, or (b) 4 people with baseball bats waiting to take their head off. The person responding to the call is forced to enter into a battle of wits unarmed. Admittedly this seems a bit unrealistic, but the service industry is known for having days filled with difficult questions. Why can’t the person returning the call at least be prepared for the interaction?
So, how does one get their point across? A very good way is e-mail. It forces you to think about the problem and how to communicate it before you press “send”. If the phone is the preferred method, the discussion tends to be improvisational unless the call is scripted in advance. This then wastes 10 minutes on a 1-minute point. By using e-mail, both parties also have a record of the question and the response so a printed copy is available if the response was forgotten in 6 months.