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Despite spending hours on the 'phone or online your customers are just not connecting with you, resulting in angry customers hanging up and going elsewhere.

We are becoming more and more divided by technology. Your customers' dread interactive voice-response, the on-hold music that doubles the annoyance of queuing, the codes and passwords, are all barriers to effective communication.

The rage among your customers has reach an intensity which is now causing great damage to your relationships with your customrs. We are now dehumanizing our customer relationships even more than conventional advertising ever did, the very objective of which was to do the exact opposite!

Your customers appear to be invisible to you except as computer generated stereotypes, while your organisation is viewed as remote and unreachable causing stress and suspicion rather than customer satisfaction.

According to a recent study by database software specialist Data Vantage, fully 89% of service providers are failing to deliver the seamless service your customers want.

Causing damage to your brands, customers to defect, thus putting more pressure on sales.

It would appear that most customer information in to days service organisations, expensively acquired, is wasted, and what does get through to Management is contaminated, diluted or otherwise unusable.

All this results in huge amounts of waste. Companies are drowing in data however, they are, oddly enough, starved of knowledge!

All resulting from a complete misunderstanding of that little word "communication".

It would appear, understandably I hasten to add, that one of the main reasons this frustration and anger occurs, is when one of your customers calls your 'phone centre to complain about a bill and then they receive a threatening reminder through the post a week later!

In reality you and your customers are being divided by technology. your relationship,conducted through computers has become so depersonalised as to be dangerous to the very well being of yor brands and business.

And, sad to say, any new channel of communication simply increases managements' opportunity to repeat mistakes. For example if you send an email, your call centre will not have seen it!

As we said earlier, all resulting from a complete misunderstanding of that word "communication".

So let us examine that word 'communication' a little more closely. A dictionary definition of communication is as follows:

Communication. n.1. Transmitting 2. A giving or exchange of information, etc by talk, writing b) the information so given 3. A means of communication 4. The science of transmitting information.

The interesting fact is the expression 'the exchange of information'.

Communication is not a one-way flow of information. Talking at or to someone does not imply successful communication. This only occurs when the receiver actually receives the message, which the sender intended to send. Message rejection,misinterpretation and misunderstanding are the opposite of effective communication .

This basic model assumes that the sender is active, whilst the receiver is inactive or passive and the message is comprehended properly. In this case if the message is creatively prepared and sent through the right medium and if it cuts through all the other noise, and then if it is decoded correctly the message has done its job!

In closing please allow me to stress that we are, despite appearances, creating more problems than we realise, all this new technology is doing is alienating your customers more than ever before.

With all the other problems, clutter, meaningless noise, mistrust, it is now vital that we rethink our position on all commercial communication. The fact is that you, the Client, can literally halve your colossal marketing budgets and armed with a true interpretation and understanding of the word 'communication' and be more cost effective...on all counts!