Team Partners Telecommunications

And the Correct Answer is…

Posted on Mar 03, 2017  | Tags: calls, call answering

Thank you!
And before you ask, that ‘Thank you’ is aimed at all those people who responded to the survey we mentioned in last month’s blog, about how you, as a business, communicate.

You’ll remember that our suggestion was that the future of communications may well be a return to the old and time tested format of speech, of actually talking to each other, and that such modern contrivances such as emails and texts may yet be exposed for what they often are… a lazy excuse for not picking up the ‘phone. We went on to say that it’s increasingly going to be those businesses that want to give great personal service that will invest in good speech based customer communications. Anyone who buys wine from the UK’s leading wine clubs will have experience of what this looks like.

So, what did our survey show us? It will be no surprise to hear that for most of us email is our choice of communications channel with our clients, followed by the phone and then face to face meetings. Very few of us make video calls and there was a sense that posting letters is unusual to the point of not happening.

Now watch this. When asked how we choose to communicate with our suppliers the order of preference changed. When it comes to dealing with them we’re happy to pick up the phone, email slips into second place, and video calls storm up the preference rankings. Why would that be? Could it be that we feel a greater urgency when it comes to talking to suppliers than we do in dealing with or finding customers? Or could it be that when we’re contacting suppliers we have an agenda, but that when we’re contacting customers that’s not the case? And if that’s the case, are we all missing a trick here, could that be a false perception?

Having stirred the pot with that thought, what else did our survey show us? To be honest most of it was quite predictable in terms of email and phones being ‘in’ and snail mail and fax being ‘out’, but here’s something of interest, 100% of respondents told us that they only checked their emails ‘sometimes’ out of office hours, as opposed to ‘often’ or ‘very often’, and 100% only answer their work phone ‘sometimes’ too, which might just suggest that at least those who read this blog are getting their work / life balance right. What do you think?