Lateral communication

The first area of focus for a business communication strategy is lateral communication: how employees communicate with each other in the sense of physical, applied communications. Do your employees have an instant messaging system in place such as Microsoft Teams or Slack? Is your enterprise e-mail solution through Google, Office 365, or something else? Do you use Google Meet or Zoom to do video calls? Are some employees given company devices upon which to communicate for business purposes? Who is your internet, cellphone, and/or landline provider, and how fast or reliable are their services?

These are all physical, applied communications decisions and they are perhaps the most foundational problem for your business to solve before further embarking on the creation of a wider business communications strategy. Every organization has its own approach. Some opt to pick and choose different platforms for different modes of communication, while others turn to communications and IT firms that provide all-in-one solutions to these problems.

While it would be impractical and a serious breach of trust if you monitored and policed the way your employees communicated down to their word choice, you can somewhat affect the overall tone of internal communications by how you hire and the importance you place on organizational culture. Paying attention to the values your company holds and how they infuse themselves throughout the organization can indirectly affect how well your team communicates amongst itself.

For example, a high-pressure law firm will hire dramatically different people than a daycare centre, and how those employees communicate amongst themselves will be equally different. While it would be impossible to directly control what people say to each other and how they say it, your company culture and values ideally do much of the work for you if you’ve hired, trained, and fostered an environment that accurately reflects them.

Please note that, at the time of this article’s writing, the companies, institutions, or organizations mentioned in this article may or may not be affiliated with Indeed, and their mention in this article does not imply a business relationship with Indeed.

Transactional communication

The next important facet of business communications is transactional communication, or how your company communicates with stakeholders (like clients or investors) and customers. This can be as simple as letting customers know about promotions, or as complicated as providing customer service or troubleshooting when required. For the simpler side of transactional communication, businesses are increasingly turning to customer relationship management (CRM) software to log what their customers purchase, how much they spend, and even more personal touches like their birthdays or anniversaries.

Maintaining these positive touch points with customers and stakeholders can drive more sales and increase loyalty by making them feel remembered and cared about. After all, who doesn’t like receiving a 15% discount on their birthday or a reminder that an item or service they’ve previously purchased is on sale? The tone, clarity, and usefulness of these communications are all vitally important to foster a sense of care. If your company provides goods or services that matter to its customers and compliments that by offering a responsive and useful customer relationship management strategy, you can expect to outperform competing companies that treat their customers like numbers. Not to mention that communications at the right time that say the right thing can drive sales—even if the customer wasn’t initially considering purchasing from you—compared to a more passive approach that relies entirely on customers coming to you to research your offerings.

For the more complicated side of transactional communication—customer service and troubleshooting—many of the same principles apply as with CRM. Proactively reaching out to customers post-purchase to see if they’re having any issues can save them the time and frustration of seeking support. Additionally, having clear and concise information your customers need in an accessible place will take the burden off your customer service team, since customers will be better able to troubleshoot on their own.

Empathy matters most in transactional communication, as regardless of the title, you don’t want interactions with customers experiencing issues to feel transactional. Training your customer service team in soft skills can go a long way towards avoiding frustrated customers. Technology also plays a major role in transactional communication: do customers have to jump through hoops to speak to a real person when they need assistance? Do you offshore your customer service team? Are your support materials and resources buried deep in your website to the point that customers just give up on seeking help from you? These are all glaring issues that cause customer discontent that can be easily fixed for much better transactional communication.

Vertical communication

Vertical communication—how your business communicates to its employees—is perhaps the touchiest realm of business communications, but it is important to get it right so your employees don’t feel condescended to or lesser-than. This even applies to seemingly small gestures like how you announce new hires (is it through e-mail or an in-person meeting?). Large companies tend to have in-house internal communications teams that handle the bulk of vertical communication, but smaller and medium-sized businesses tend to take a more off-the-cuff approach where the owner or some other company higher-up communicates directly to staff lower on the org chart. This can be a recipe for disaster if not handled properly.

For example, a key employee has fallen ill and is on medical leave until further notice. The tactful approach to this would be to give as few details as possible, provide the employee with their privacy, direct questions to someone in HR or whoever is filling in, and perhaps offer a digital card for everyone to sign or share words of encouragement that will be passed along to the sick employee. The bad way to approach this would be to send a mass e-mail disclosing the nature of the illness, not offering someone to contact in their absence, and giving the employee’s personal information to contact them for words of encouragement. This is worse than not doing anything at all and can cause a chilling effect where the remaining employees feel the company does not have their back.

Just as business leaders must be mindful of how they communicate, vertical communication works the other way too. Employees need a forum to speak to those higher up. If you don’t offer these chances, issues can fester and criticism will end up on the internet before it ends up on your desk. Be mindful that improper vertical communication can open the door to legal repercussions, especially if termination of employment or layoffs are involved, so err on the safe side and hire a skilled internal communications professional, or receive training in the field if you find yourself in a position of authority frequently communicating with your employees (or vice versa).

Holistic communication

Lastly, since social media can change a company’s perception and fortunes in the blink of an eye, you need to be aware of your company’s holistic communications—its PR image, marketing, advertising, and the general impression you put out into the world. The most effective holistic communications embody what the company stands for while creating an urge among consumers to “join the pack.” Your public-facing communications across all touch points are either useful or entertaining to have any value. Consumers generally dislike being bombarded with ads, especially when the ads don’t inform them or move them in any way. Much like transactional communications, your holistic communications influence whether or not people “care” about your company beyond the services or products it provides.

You only need to look on social media to see what happens to companies that put out negative, condescending, or otherwise irrelevant holistic communications. Something as simple as a screenshot of a negative support interaction with a rep from your company can spiral into something much bigger (much in the same way a heartfelt thank you from a customer can pick up steam and propel your business to success). Unless you happen to have professional marketing experience, it is strongly encouraged that you enlist the services of an advertising and marketing agency to handle your company’s holistic communications. The risks of not doing a good job drastically outweigh the cost savings of doing it yourself, and you don’t want to blow all your hard work building your company on a single brash communications decision.

While we’ve just scratched the surface of business communication, it’s easy to see just how important it is. Spend time auditing your current communications approach and you may find small tweaks can lead to untold improvement. Just be sure to centre your company’s mission, vision, and values in every communications touch point and you’ll have an authentic, effective business communications strategy that can stand the test of time.