How do you tell your customers about your products and services and how they will make their lives better?
Probably through cracking web copy, brochures, emails, newsletter and that sort of thing.
Written well, they help you communicate your points clearly and succinctly.
Great.
So how do you make sure your employees understand your company values and what’s expected of them?
You OK? You’ve gone quiet.
Internal communication is often something that’s overlooked.
Perhaps companies don’t see it as worthy of investment because they believe it’s obvious what the company stands for and every employee knows that…don’t they?
Do they?
If you haven’t told them how will they know?
OK, you may have handed over your employee handbook when they first started with you 5 years ago, but a lot has changed since then.
Poor communication leads to :
- Poor customer service
- Unhappy, unmotivated employees
- A high staff turnover rate
You don’t want any of those, so what can you do about it?
Getting your message across
To start with you don’t want to be patronising, you just want everyone to understand what’s expected of them.
An informative intranet or enterprise social solution will help with the transmission of information, and make your employees feel more connected and empowered.
After all, how many times have you worked in organisations where departments didn’t communicate with each other so no one knew what was happening?
My recent run in with BT illustrates this perfectly. After being given 4 conflicting stories as to why my broadband wasn’t working we finally discovered that BT had switched us off 4 days before Plusnet was due to take over. I was then told that they were very sorry and they would put me through to their technical department who would be able to switch our line back on.
Surprise, surprise when speaking to the techies they informed me they couldn’t do that and we’d just have to cope without connection.
See – poor internal communication leading to diabolical service and a very, very unhappy customer.
Ask someone who can
If writing in an engaging tone that follows brand guidelines is a bit daunting, get someone in who can help you.