Your employees’ communication with clients and customers goes a long way. For instance, just one harsh word from a worker can mar a customer’s experience and lead to negative word of mouth and bad reviews. Fortunately, there are several effective, proven ways to enhance communication and interactions with clients and customers.
Mindfulness Meditation Classes
Meditation for employees helps with employee-client communication quite a bit. Sessions are available in other areas too such as stress, anxiety, anger, sleep, and visualizing success at work, among many other things.
As far as employee-client communication topics, meditation helps employees focus their full attention on clients. Employees learn more about being 100 percent present for client communications. If your employees have not really been hearing clients’ needs, or even worse, flat-out ignoring them, then meditation can help tremendously.
Depending on the meditation company, sessions are available for up to 25, 50, 100, 500, or even 1,000 people. Many companies conduct sessions in-person and virtually through platforms such as Zoom and Teams.
Streamline Project Management and Employees’ Communication With One Another
Sometimes, employee-client communication mishaps occur because employees are out of the loop. They relay outdated or incorrect information to clients. You make it easier for employees to communicate with one another through employee communication apps or platforms, project-specific software that includes real-time communication components, online forums, regular meetings, and ongoing feedback.
It’s worth taking a look at project management, too. Clients usually do not need to communicate with any employee at your company willy-nilly. One or two points of contact tend to work well. It is even more critical to keep these point-of-contact employees looped in so they give clients the correct information.
Establish Clear Policies for Communications Between Customers and Clients
Speaking of client points of contact, they can be valuable parts of a company’s communications plan. Communications policies set expectations for your employees as to how they should communicate with different sets of people: clients/customers, other employees, the general public, etc. When establishing or revising policies, think about issues such as:
- How to deal with clients who constantly call or contact employees for updates or revision requests
- Communication styles and policies for different tools and modalities (platforms such as Asana, phone, email, text, written and verbal communication, etc.)
- Preferences or priorities for sharing information (communications platforms, live chat, PDFs, shared documents, etc.)
- Points of contact
- Client briefings
- Virtual and in-person client meetings
- Project/content calendars
- Communication during crisis situations
- How to get to the point quickly
- How to set clear expectations and follow-up expectations
- Making project roles clear and transparent
- Approaches for establishing rapport, building trust, and avoiding assumptions
- What to do in case of communication lapses or bad communication
Depending on the work your company does and the level of employee-client interaction, your guidelines could be more of an outline or quite detailed. The company policies could include guidelines such as answering emails within 24 hours on business days, a minimum five-day turnaround time on client projects no matter how small clients say they are, and written project briefs (with verbal briefings from clients not accepted).
Of course, as your company grows or changes, your communications policies are likely to evolve. Don’t keep them static and unyielding! Set at least one time and date per year to make sure your communications policies still serve their purpose.
Communicate Well With Your Employees
Be the best communication model you can be for your employees and foster a positive communication atmosphere at your company. Treat your employees the way you want them to treat clients and customers: positively, affirmatively, respectfully, professionally, and so on. Just like you have communications policies for employee interactions with clients, you should for manager/supervisor communications with employees.
Being a good corporate communicator works on several levels. On a practical level, it is excellent for employee morale since employees are more motivated to communicate well with customers and other people.
On more abstract levels, employees learn by seeing and doing. If you give them genuine praise and thoughtful feedback, they internalize the hows, wheres, and whys.
Corporate culture acts as the framework for much that follows. Strive to keep the flow of communication and feedback ongoing rather than a performance review once a year as the only time you genuinely communicate with workers. (Annual performance reviews have good uses and shouldn’t be scrapped, per se. They just should not be the sole basis of employer-employee communication.)
Hold Communication Training
Not everyone can read communication policies or observe the workplace environment and intuitively understand what to do. Communication training can be through the form of meditation sessions as mentioned earlier, but there is more to it.
Training can touch on many topics such as how to master a specific software program. It can also cover active listening, asking open-ended questions, nonverbal communication, basic business grammar, communication accessibility for people with disabilities, and much more. It can take many forms, including live seminars, Zoom meetings, and online tutorials.
Prioritize communication training and meditation sessions as part of your company’s emphasis on good communication. Stay on top of communication guidelines and serve as a good role model for employees.
