Beside face to face communication, there are a number of media and channels we are using in our daily communication, such as telephone and voice mail, digital communication through email, texting and social media, etc. Different channels being used will significantly affect the efficiency of communication. Once we are choosing a communication channel, there are a number of factors we need to take into consideration, including security, convenience and so on. However, here the primary factor we are considering is the effectiveness of communication. Choosing the communication channel which best promotes the effectiveness can be an important topic in the both practical work and real life.
Different communication channels have different strength and weakness. For example, in a face to face oral communication, people are able to receive immediate feedback on other’s comments, and change their views or messages accordingly. Of course, this is also achievable in a telecommunication. More importantly, we are able to read people’s facial expressions and body language, which will convey a lot more messages than verbal language. The disadvantage of oral communication is that the message is difficult to store and retrieve. People will lose the most content of conversation in their memory soon. So sometimes it is difficult to retrieve the information received orally. As for electronic mail, it has a number of advantages. It is regardless of the barrier in terms of time and space. It can be printed, saved electronically, or forwarded to multiple recipients. The common disadvantage of email is that it often contains more or less typos which may leads to misinterpret or misunderstanding between sender and receiver. In this sense, we need to know in the different circumstances, which kind of channel will best serve the purpose for communication.
There is a real story in my life I would like to share with you about the importance of choosing a right communication channel. During one of the school vacation, I worked as a sales executive for a local company. At the very beginning, my job was to approach to the potential merchants which are most restaurants and then try to make the initial meeting appointment with them. Once I got the task, I started to send emails to all the merchants in the contact list. In just three days, I sent more than 700 emails. However, I found the rate of reply was extremely low, about only 5 percent. So I tried to find out the reason. Sending emails may be a good way to introduce your company to the people who are unfamiliar with it. But is it enough to convince them to give you an opportunity for a further business discussion? After thinking it over, I changed to another way of communication. I contacted the merchants by calling them directly. However, I found this is neither a good way, because most of the contact numbers we got were branches instead of the head office, where I was not able to get to the person in charge directly. Besides, the environment in the branches was always noisy and people are busy and impatient, so it was very difficult to exchange the useful information in the phone call. At last, I tried walk-in and face-to-face communication. Finally I found this was the most effective way and help me to get most meeting appointment in the shortest time.
Be it in practical work or personal life, choosing the right way of communication is really important to all of us. This is the skill we are always learning and improving from the day to day life. Think about it and choose the best approach for conveying your message.
