A gangster enters a darkened room with his lieutenant. In the corner, tied up and cowering on a small wooden chair sits his foreign accountant.

“Where’s the million dollars you embezzled from me?” barks the gangster.

His lieutenant steps forward, “Boss, the guy’s from overseas and doesn’t speak any English. I’ll have to translate for you.”

The gangster pulls out a hand gun and shoves its muzzle into the accountant’s temple. “Ask him where my money is” he commands.

The lieutenant speaks to the accountant in a foreign tongue, and in the same language the accountant yells: “Okay! Okay! I’ll tell you! The money’s hidden behind a false panel in my office wall, right behind my desk!”

“Well” says the gangster “What did he say?”

“He says you’re bluffing Boss and you don’t have the guts to pull the trigger” smiles the lieutenant.

There’s no doubt about it, not being able to make yourself understood can get you in an awful mess!

In my experience the root of most problems, be they in the workplace or in the home, rest with communication difficulties.

How many issues could be resolved quickly and easily if people just learnt how to communicate effectively with each other?

Poor communication is responsible for the breakdown in many relationships, both business and personal.

In the words of a past British Telecom advertising campaign encouraging people to use their telephones more often – “It’s good to talk!”

But even more importantly this should be developed to – “It’s good to be understood!”

If the other person doesn’t understand the message you’re trying to put across, it can lead to some pretty extreme results, as suggested in my opening.

Things can get a little easier when communicating face-to-face with someone. They have the opportunity to question and ask you to repeat things they don’t understand. However, where predominantly one-way communication takes place, as in the Internet business environment, things become somewhat harder.

So what strategies can you employ to overcome this hurdle?

Firstly, you can provide as many opportunities as practicable to facilitate the transformation of customer communication from a one-way to a two-way process. You could achieve this by prominently displaying you’re contact details and positively encouraging people to communicate their questions and concerns with you by telephone, fax or e-mail.

You could also expand upon this by using online services such as ICQ and Yahoo Messenger, which facilitate real time conversation.

Secondly, you could critically assess, review and edit the message that your website is communicating to your potential customers. This is not just a case of changing the text of your sales copy. The design and layout of your site can often transmit a strong message that may not always be positive in the eyes of others. However, the text alone is a good place to start.

Perhaps the easiest way of assessing the effectiveness of your sales copy is by trying it out on other people. Print it out and have your friends, family or colleagues read through it.

Do they have a question after reading it?

Are any passages confusing?

Using this approach will discover potential for communications breakdown that can be resolved quite simply. If you can anticipate what people want to know and provide the answers before they ask the questions, you’re well on the way to establishing effective communication with your customers.

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: being understood, communicating, communication

I was recently reminded of a TV advert promoting a travel company. In the ad a character was wandering about a wilderness calling out “Is there anybody there?”. The idea of the ad was that everyone had gone off on cheap holidays bought from the travel company.

OK, so what’s the point?

I was reminded of this while searching the web for joint venture partners for an extremely lucrative deal I wanted to offer them. I was more than a little surprised at what I found; or what I didn’t find more like.

I couldn’t believe how difficult it was on a lot of websites to find an email address I could use to contact the webmaster or someone at the company. Granted, some had one of those featureless online message forms. I don’t know about you, but I find them very impersonal, somewhat akin to posting a message in a bottle, tossing it in the sea and hoping sometime someone will answer.

I much prefer a proper bona fide email address that I can enter in the “To:” box of my email, and a name of a real person to converse with. I’m sure I’m not alone. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of your potential customers jumping up with a hand in the air at this point, shouting “Me to! Me to!”

The upshot of this is that some webmasters and companies somewhere lost out on the opportunity of making a tidy sum all because of a missing contact email address.

The moral of the story is don’t make the same mistake on your website. Include your full contact details, make it blindingly obvious where they’re located, and above all make it easy for people to contact you.

Don’t worry, you won’t have a queue of clients forming outside your front door, or ringing you up at all hours of the day and night. What you probably will have, is more trusting clients, safe in the knowledge that they know where you live and can ’send the boys round’ to knee cap you if you ’stiff’ them. No, sorry! Got a little carried away there.

Including your full contact details on your website, i.e. name, position, email, telephone and fax numbers, and mailing address, will help your clients to have a little more trust in you. By identifying yourself, they can hopefully see that your not some ‘fly by night’ who’s going to do a ‘moonlit flit’ before they get their goods. You’re not are you?

Also, on an even more positive note, next time someone like me comes along ready to offer you a stonking great joint venture deal that’s going to make us loads and loads of ‘wonga’, they’ll be able to find you won’t they?

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: communication, contact, customers