I enjoy talking to people. If I spend a few minutes with someone, it is the rare person with whom I find it hard to connect. It does not matter if it is the guy working on my dock or an executive of a large company. Whenever there is a call that needs to be made by our company and no one else wants to do it, I end up making the call. Most of my tough calls end up pleasant. I spent many years defusing dissatisfied customers at Apple. You learn how to do it well especially if the message to fix it came directly from Steve Jobs.
Clearly, things are changing in the world of communication. Our telephones ring so much with unwanted calls that many of us, myself included, like to make the few telephone calls that we take meaningful. Our children are fond of text messages. I like to think of text messages as the great enabler of passive aggressiveness. They're easy to ignore and if you are clever, you can respond with almost a non response.
I went away to boarding school at the tender age of fourteen. The weekend call home from the telephone booth in the hallway was a lifeline to family and all that was familiar. You might not be able to predict the person who would answer but you learned how to make the most out of whomever you got on the phone. The old fashioned telephone was a great leveler. If you called one of your friends, you could get their parents, but back in the fifties and sixties, we learned how to talk to adults respectfully.
After the weekend call became more of a ritual than a lifeline, it was something that kept us connected long after the art of writing letters disappeared. I still love phone calls to my Canadian friends. Some of them rarely if ever use cell phones. I enjoy talking to my friends whether I reach the wife or the husband. These calls do not fall into the category of too much communication.
Most days it is not very hard to find too much communication with too little listening. The easiest one is the email that you send which someone only reads the subject and never opens it to read the whole thing. You can send a lot of emails without getting anyone to listen to what you are saying. Businesses also compete aggressively for our attention so it is not uncommon for them to scream their message from websites, email, television, and even billboards. The hope is to get a piece of our thoughts so that we might contact them and become a customer or client.
Yet some of these same people make so much communications noise while getting their message out, that they have a hard time listening and responding appropriately.
I recently wanted some information about an area. I went to a website and did what I hate to do which is type my questions into a little scrolling window and click a button to send them a web-based email response. I had searched in vain for a real human email address but none was to be found on their website. Companies often favor this web-based communication because they can time the response and they believe it protects them from spam.
Actually, it protects them from real communication. I got a text message from them the next day saying they were having trouble with my email address. I sent it to them by text. Had I been able to send an email the first time, all they would have needed to do would be to respond to my email.
The three or four questions I asked were pretty simple and if I got reasonable answers, I would pick up the phone and establish a real connection. That was on a Saturday and I was assured that I would have my answers soon. By the next Wednesday, I had received no answers so I asked again and mentioned that I would like to have the answers quickly since I would be visiting the area soon. I answered the question of when I was coming and was assured once again that I would soon have the answers.
After visiting the area one week after initially asking my questions and still not getting any answers, I sent a note to my contact and asked them if they treated all their clients that way. I got a note back with an apology but still no answers to my questions. I guess I should have fallen all over myself accepting the apology because I got another note back saying that he apologized and life was too short to deal with people like me. I still did not get the answers.
In total there were six or seven emails back and forth but I ended up finding my own answers by asking other people. Maybe I should have picked up the phone, but when I am asking for detailed information, I like to put it in writing and leave as little room for error as possible. It seems that no one at the company I contacted cared enough to take the time to answer my questions in writing. I was told I had no idea what was going on in the life of my contact. It must have been amazing since not one of their fifteen people could find time to answer the questions.
I had to think of how different their response was than what I got from the letter that I wrote to J.H. Longmire and Sons in Bridgetown, Nova Scotia in the spring of 1971. I wrote about a four-line ad that I had seen in the classified ads of the Boston Globe. Mr. Longmire's response was enough to get me in my truck for a journey to Nova Scotia that led me to a new adventure in my life. I ended up buying my first farm.
My next example is the all-too-typical modern company selling services over the web. The company had a nice reminder service that let you send email reminders to yourself for tasks. I tried it for a while and found it wasn't what I needed. Six months later I found an email saying that I had been billed for my next year of service. I went to the website and checked to make certain I could get a refund and eventually found the right email address. In forty-eight hours, I had gotten no response from my first email. I sent another email and still no response. There was no telephone number but a twitter address and a Facebook page. I sent comments to those addresses. The next day I did some sleuthing and tracked down a phone number. I called and left a voice mail. Finally, four or five days after my initial email I got a response and an apology saying my money would be refunded.
It is clear that some forms of communication do not work very well these days.
Perhaps, the best strategy is to focus on being good at communicating a couple of ways instead of trying to be so available that you don't have time to listen when someone does contact you.
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