5. You have been promoted to Director of Technical Support Services. One of the

Question

5. You have been promoted to Director of Technical Support Services. One of the goals you have identified for your department is to ensure that all employees have effective interpersonal and professional communications with internal and external customers. To help accomplish this goal, you need to write a communication skills checklist for your staff to follow. This checklist would include the top five rules of communication you want your staff to follow. List the five rules you would put on the checklist as well as a justification for each.

Explanation / Answer

CHECKLIST

Rule #1: Be on the same page as your client:

If you want to build a lasting relationship with your client, you have to reach a mutual understanding. This means you have to speak their language.

So our first rule start with bearing in mind that your and your clients’ perspectives will not typically coincide.

That is normal, as long as you can maintain a balance between performance and results. While it is essential for your professional growth to focus on processes, you need to remember that your clients are more interested in seeing results.

Rule #2: Your processes must be measurable and transparent for all involved parties:

Always be open with your clients. Although it is true that your results speak for themselves, it is your job to elucidate them. They should be measurable and transparent, so you need to find the right tools and techniques to best depict your progress.

Let’s take a look at the following matrix, usually applied to agency–client relationships. It explains the correlation between the transparency of a company’s inner processes and the level of trust this company receives from its clients.

Rule # 3: Educate your clients; motivate your employees to communicate and cooperate:

It is a well-known fact that, to close a deal and maintain a lasting relationship, you need to educate your clients. And you can organise training sessions and tutorials to instruct them on core principles, processes and essential metrics they should be aware of.

But make sure you provide them with this information in small doses. To lead an effective educational session, you should prepare to explain the professional nuances of digital marketing and SEO activities in terms that will be intelligible. Your clients are not specialists – they come to you because you are. In fact, if you confuse them with difficult explanations, there is a high probability that you will lose their trust.

Apart from educating your clients, it is important to educate your colleagues as well. When you don’t know what’s going, you can’t weigh the importance of a process, and it’s easy to see little value in other people’s work.

Rule #4: Make your pitches data-driven:

A data-driven approach will help you reinforce your pitches with actual data, and this makes your words not just your opinion, but professional expertise.

The key? You should be very specific, very comprehensive, and provide your clients with up-to-date data.

With the help of some of the great tools available, you can point out the weak and strong sides of current marketing efforts, as well as compare a site’s performance with major competitors and industry benchmarks.

For a more detailed insight, take a look at my recent post on competitive intelligence, where I shed light on this aspect of your digital marketing strategy and share the best tools for conducting competitive research.

Rule #5: Use prebuilt templates for reports:

Reporting is a routine part of the digital marketer’s life. You have to prepare both internal and external reports. I advise that you use prebuilt templates; from my personal experience, they save a lot of time.

For organizing your reports, using Google Drive is a good idea. If you use the tools mentioned in sections above for getting data for your reports, you can also use these tools’ APIs to update some data automatically. I also advise that you use pivot tables, if you aren’t already. Pivot tables are Excel’s most useful feature, designed especially for working with large data sets; they allow you to update numbers by updating the source data of a previously created pivot table.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse 5
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.