How you say it
18 January 2023
When faced with having to contact someone, it’s perhaps surprising how many people’s first instinct is to send a text.
And it’s not just those of younger generations who favour the speed and directness of the medium. However, while ideal for short, informal messages, other formats like emails and phone calls can be preferable. They can also give a clearer indication of whether contact has actually been successfully made or not.
This was mentioned on one of a series of webinars addressing issues relating to hire management software and staff development, presented jointly by Guy van der Knaap, MD of MCS Rental Software, and Diane Banister, MD of the Intelligent Dialogue training and personnel development consultancy that has worked with a significant number of hire organisations.
Recordings of the series of four webinars can be viewed online here and one on Increasing Customer Satisfaction discussed the importance of conducting communications in the most suitable medium for a particular purpose or outcome. Using emails and phone calls might require careful planning and management.
Diane cited a striking statistic that it could take 12 positive customer experiences to eventually make amends for a negative one. Feedback could be gathered using a number of criteria including customer ratings, a net promoter score (how likely a client would recommend the company), or a customer effort score (how easy it was to do business).
Guy van der Knaap spoke of perhaps the most serious feedback indicator of all: when customers quietly stop doing business either partially or totally. It was therefore vital to have software systems in place to track customers’ spend and activity, to compare it with expected levels and to take account of seasonal trends or different equipment types.
The others webinars in the series dealt with Increasing Revenue; Managing Costs; and Improving Consistency in a Multi Site Organisation.
