Effective Communication: Deliver, Iterate, and Improve
Part III
Welcome to the final portion of my ramblings on effective communication. ( Parts I & Part II )
Finally, it’s time to deliver our well-formed, tailored messages! There are many ways to communicate the same message. Just like how we tailored our message content to specific audiences, our method of delivery also has to be tailored to these respective audiences per their preferences. That’s because different people receive information in different ways and different people have different amounts of time.
NOTE One tricky thing to note here is that even people within the same audience group may receive information in different ways. Therefore, it’s important to deliver messages using multiple methods depending on the content and scenarios when such information is needed.
There are two general formats of delivery: Push and Pull.
Push Communication
Push communication is a one-way communication where information is sent out to a large audience. This type of communication is often used in marketing campaigns, where businesses send out emails or social media posts to promote their products or services. Push communication can also be used in internal communications, where companies send out newsletters or emails to their employees.
The benefits of push communication include:
It can reach a large audience quickly.
It can be used to promote products or services.
It can be used to keep employees informed of company news.
We keep our customers up to date with all new information when it becomes available
The drawbacks of push communication include:
It can be seen as spam or unsolicited communication.
It can be difficult to track the effectiveness of push communication campaigns.
It can be difficult to personalize push communication campaigns.
If the information is unwanted at the time, it may not be received.
Examples: mailing lists, live talks, announcements, road shows, etc…
Pull Communication
Pull communication is a two-way communication where information is shared between two or more parties. This type of communication is often used in customer service, where customers can contact a company to get help with a product or service. Pull communication can also be used in internal communications, where employees can communicate with each other through instant messaging or email.
The benefits of pull communication include:
It allows for two-way communication.
It allows for personalized communication.
It allows for tracking the effectiveness of pull communication campaigns.
If a customer has questions about our products, they know where to get it
The drawbacks of pull communication include:
It can be difficult to reach a large audience quickly.
It can be difficult to promote products or services.
It can be difficult to keep employees informed of company news.
Organizing, updating, and maintaining this information is difficult and time consuming.
Examples: Documentation, recorded talks, slack channels, office hours, biweekly updates, etc….
Both push and pull communication have their own benefits and drawbacks. The best type of communication to use will depend on the specific situation.
Ship in pieces and iterate
In a perfect world, we’d go through the steps above once and hit immediate success: everyone received our messaging well and now understands how to use our products and how to best work with us. That is rarely ever the case. How many companies do you know that tried one iteration of their product and immediately found product market fit and rapid user growth?
It’s okay to try a few things, learn from the failures, and evolve. This whole cycle is not a straight line from milestones 1 through 6. This stage and the next form a recursive cycle for learning and improving. Sometimes we may even have to go back to stage 1 to adjust our vision to accommodate for change.
We should still form a vision for the whole org, but we don’t have to send the entire message all at once. As a test start, I recommend limiting the message in a few ways to allow for trial and error.
Adapt and Evolve
At this stage, we know our evangelization efforts have worked and we’re looking to continuously improve communication and collaboration with our customers.
It’s important to note that missions, visions, and strategies can and will change as you iterate. The exciting thing about serving live customers is that they’re constantly changing and so your solution will have to evolve with them and that’s ok! However, it’s always important to have a plan and vision. Without one is chaos.
IMPORTANT! Just like continuous integration, there is never a fully complete stage with evangelizing. Especially when customer teams are constantly changing and growing themselves. Our messages to a specific audience may also need to change with them. Communication is two ways. We need to routinely get feedback and revisit the other stages if necessary to stay on the same page with our customers.
Keeping our information up to date may also take significant maintenance efforts. We need to keep in mind that this is not a one-time effort. Ingraining efforts like always writing proper documentation into our culture can help us stay aligned.
Think of evangelization efforts like a product launch. How do we determine if a new product is successful? We need to establish some measurable metrics and define what success means.
Here are some suggestions of what these measurements can be:
Getting Feedback
CSAT surveys
Customer interviews
Metrics
Amount of customer engagement
# of questions around a product
Amount of usage of our products
# of days delayed for Feature launch with platform dependencies
If you have other ways to measure and improve your communication with your stakeholders and customers, please share! I’d love to learn from you!