The essence of marketing is the development of long-term and value-laden relationships with customers. Almost all successful business entities throughout the world specifically focus on internal and external communication to build up a rapport with customers.
In communication effectiveness, the two main criteria are the technical quality portraying the core service and functional quality that reflects on how the service is delivered to the customer.
Effective communication skills are instrumental in generating important client trust in an organisation. Timely and transparent communication aligns perceptions that foster customer confidence in the organisation.
Meaningful communication helps customers to understand the latest development in the market that often leads to eliminating misconceptions about a company, product, or service.
Resolving issues
By keeping the communication avenues open for customers frequently and resolving issues with regular follow-ups, the customer retention rate of an organisation can be kept intact. Having discussed the technicalities, let us define the term business communication.
Among many definitions, I chose the meaning of communication as the process of sharing information between employees within the organisation and also with customers and other stakeholders outside the organisation.
As described earlier, the process is both internal and external.
A breakdown in any one of these communication processes can lead to adverse repercussions for the company. The effectiveness of business communication is one of the most vitally important aspects of business success.
There are four types of business communication. They are internal upward, internal downward, internal lateral, and external communication.
Internal upward communication comes from subordinates to superiors of the organisation. The superiors learn about the ground level of the company through internal upward communication that usually includes regular periodical reports and other modes of feedback.
Information about the ground-level operation is recurrently updated by the employees for the smooth functioning of the operation.
For example, functional information of marketing, sales, services and technical operations is delivered to the hierarchy on a regular basis.
Internal downward communication is the instructions, guidance, warnings, details of special events, and other related information delivered by the superiors to employees.
Downward communication is often delivered to the staff by internal memos, often via emails in the present context, or verbally.
Staff members
Meanwhile, internal lateral communication is an exchange of official information among the staff members on official matters. Lateral communication flow can also be between departments or individual employees.
Internal lateral exchange of information is crucially important in a company as most of the customer affairs are managed by employees at the functional level.
For example, details of sales from the sales department have to be updated constantly to the service or technical department to keep customers happy.
External communication covers prospects, customers, suppliers, service providers, and all other outside stakeholders of the company.
External business communication also is extremely important for the success and growth as the revenue generation for the organisation are done through external customers.
From lead generation onwards, constant, effective, and friendly communication is expected to keep the business running smoothly.
Quality communication in business always provides positive impacts except on occasions where technology related to communication is misused or abused and when time is wasted through the continuous usage of social media.
Communication media has made social life easier.
Today, many free downloading messenger and video telephony applications such as WhatsApp, Viber, Imo, FaceTime are extensively being used in day-to-day life and business.
Quality communication exchange improves employee engagement that also often increases productivity.
Entrepreneurs are aware that engaging employees is critical for retaining good quality talent. Employees who are engaged in work are usually more motivated and remain committed to the job.
The vast majority of employees believe that effective communication inside the office increases productivity by several folds.
It was observed that employees daily spend valuable time in search of information required performing their respective jobs. Good internal communication flow that engages staff adequately can reduce time wasted on these searches.
Remote work
The remote working and work from home concept has become tremendously popular and highly acceptable to the business community.
Irrespective of the size, many organisations, including those in Sri Lanka have transformed their operations to remote work methods after the Covid-19 pandemic surfaced a year ago. The majority of them have already declared that they will continue to use the remote work model in the future. The quality communication process will be one of the most vital factors for this model to be successful. Communicating on internal matters with colleagues while working from home can be mutually beneficial to both employer and employee in the long run.
According to the labour demand survey report, the cost of employee turnover in profit organisations is up to 150 per cent of the remuneration package. This means employee turnover is a costly affair for companies.
Effective communication helps companies to reduce such employee turnover. Lack of adequate two-way communication flow is one of the major factors for employee turnover.
It is common knowledge that replacing an employee requires an expensive selection and training process. Organisations with engaged and satisfied employees experience lower turnover rates according to research reports.
Lapses in internal communication flow can lead to stress, frustration, and disengagement, making employees immensely discontented.
Enhanced communication efforts by organisations improve knowledge sharing both with staff and also with the outside stakeholder of the company. A well-planned communication strategy is that companies can provide accurate information to the staff members and educate customers about important aspects that are mutually useful.
A proper communication policy is one of the most vital factors in building a good organisational culture, in line with the company’s goals.
A good culture in an organisation leads to a better workplace environment, making a team of a motivated and productive set of workers.
The salient feature of a satisfied workforce is that they always are capable of producing a happy clientele.