Case on Business Communication

A Project undertaken for a leading IT firm which aims to nurture business communication skill at junior and middle levels in its Offshore IT Infrastructure Support team contributing to improvement in  business delivery,  higher customer satisfaction, overall organizational  effectiveness and employee’s  perception of personal growth.

1. The IT Infra support team operated with a team of 60 engineers who provided customer support via mail (90%) & phone to US based clients.
2. The team, in general, lacked awareness of and sensitivity to the client’s cultural nuances and language usage.
3. There was an influence of mother tongue and Indian cultural contexts in the typical support engineer’s English.
4. The above lead to miscommunication and had potential for serious offense being taken by customers.
5. There were incidents in the past which had led to serious customer dissatisfaction.
6. As an interim measure, a ‘gatekeeper’ was appointed to screen all outgoing communication to ensure that was no ‘potential dissatisfiers’. This was indicative of the severe nature of the problem being faced.

Further discussions in January 2005 resulted in the following conclusions.

1. The roll out of the project proposed to start February 2005, and aimed to close by July 2005. Objective of the project was to create and execute a program which would improve business communication skills, both written & verbal, of this group of employees. The program laid special emphasis on creating an understanding of American culture and language usage and one key output was reduction in customer dissatisfaction due to communication related errors.
2. The program was first delivered to the Managers, to ensure their buyin and further coaching of their team membersfor skill development. Accordingly a phase wise deliverables plan was drawn up and implemented.  Read more