What’s a powerful way to improve your business? How can you resolve most business problems? What can you do to motivate staff and engage customers?
If you answered, “business communication,” you’re an exceptional entrepreneur. You understand something so obvious that most people miss it. Without communication, you have various levels of misinterpretation and mistakes.
In a nutshell, successful business communication can motivate employees, increase productivity, provide better customer service, enhance your brand, troubleshoot your business and boost your bottom line.
Let’s take a look at how this all works:
- Motivate employees
Employees feel frustrated by vague directions on what to do and no feedback on how they are doing. This ambiguity stirs job dissatisfaction. Without these two simple forms of communication, they feel lost. They are not quite sure what they should be doing and they are not sure if they are doing things the right way.
If you want to take this up a notch, then share your corporate vision, too. Once you get your employees to buy into your vision, they will be on fire to get things done as soon as they show up for work.
Finally, it’s also important to communicate appreciation for top performers. You should go beyond words and communicate through meaningful rewards and awards. Employers who are generous with rewards motivate employees to be generous with their efforts.
- Increase productivity
While it’s wonderful to motivate employees, you have to give them the tools to be more productive. Willingness to do good work is not enough. Employees also need knowledge and skills on how to do things well.
How do you develop job skills and develop core competencies?
You can develop mentorship programs and training workshops. You can also send employees for certification programs, and some may be available online.
- Provide better customer service
To understand good customer service, we have to first understand bad customer service.
Imagine the following scenario:
You see an advertisement. It offers you a machine that will solve your problem. You call the number you saw and speak to a sales representative. It takes a long time to get through, but you finally talk to someone. They affirm that the machine will do what you want it to do.
You place your order and the machine arrives on your doorstep. Despite the instruction diagrams, you don’t know how to assemble it. This time it takes two hours for someone to answer the phone. Finally, you get a chance to speak to someone. He explains how to assemble the machine. Unfortunately, you still have some problems assembling it. Rather than wait on the phone for hours to get someone to answer a simple question, you ship it back and ask for a refund.
Now imagine the same scenario if the company offered excellent customer service.
When you call to inquire about the machine, you get through quickly. When you call in to ask how to assemble it, you get through quickly. You get clear instructions on how to assemble it. You do your best to follow the instructions, but still appear to miss a step. When you call again, you get through quickly and the rep walks you through the final steps. After you have the machine set up, you tell everyone about the machine and the great customer service.
The problem is neither the machine nor the company’s reps. It is the company’s high success rate. They are getting more calls than they can handle. In the final analysis, the problem is the company’s inefficient phone system. By adding call centre phone systems, the company would offer excellent customer service.
- Enhance your brand
Most companies spend a great deal of money to enhance their brand. But if people love to work for a company, it will produce better products and services. If the company also offers excellent customer service, buyers will become unofficial brand ambassadors. The best way to enhance a brand is through word-of-mouth marketing.
- Troubleshoot your business.
If your business is not doing as well as you had hoped there is some miscommunication somewhere. There is something you don’t know that is a bottleneck in your business. Communication is a feedback loop between managers, workers, vendors, and customers. This will help you to identify what is not working and take steps to correct it.
- Improve your line of products
Products improve because of innovation. Innovation, in turn, is a result of feedback from workers and customers. Feedback helps identify problems in the production process. Feedback helps identify problems experienced by end users. A company can use this information to drop unsatisfactory products. It can also use this information to innovate produce products that customers will love.
7.Boost your bottom line
With everything working in your favor, it will transform your bottom line. After all, business communication has helped you to motivate employees, increase productivity, provide better customer service, enhance your brand, troubleshoot your business, and improve your line of products.
Communicate to Connect
If you get serious about business communication, things start to fall into place. Once you focus on enhancing communication, you’re aligning with the invisible forces of human cooperation. Since a business is a network of people, think of communication as the glue that connects all the moving parts.
