Reading and Purpose of Reading from Business Communication of MB0023 SMU MBA

According to the Webster, “Reading is thinking under the stimulus of the printed page.” Or “Reading is a psycho-linguistic guessing game.”

When you read, you read the lines, read between the lines and also read beyond the lines. So reading is nothing but a decoding process.

Purpose of reading:

We read many things in our day-to-day lives. Let us name a few of them:

Newspapers and magazines

Advertisements, leaflets, pamphlets

Textbooks, novels, short-stories

Letters, telegrams

Recipes, puzzles, menus

Articles, reports, legal documents

Dictionaries, telephone directories

Cartoons, comic strips

Time-tables, maps, statistical graphs and diagrams etc.

We have just listed the different texts that we normally read witch certain definite purpose in mind. They are read either for personal interest, for pleasure, to acquire information or to participate in society. For you, as students, the purpose of reading is emphasized on either for interest or for pleasure and reading to acquire information and knowledge. Reading for interest of pleasure is usually fulfilled through reading fiction, while reading to learn is associated with informative articles. Reading for information may be both internal and external. When you read for necessary background information about what is going on within the company where you work, or within your group it is called reading for internal information. Reading for the information of what is going on in your field, but outside your own company is called External information.

You may need to do something concrete in the not too distant future after you have read whatever it is you are reading this is Action Reading. Professional reading is done when you need to continue learning and studying so that you develop your own thinking and skills. But you should bear in mind that the text itself is not written strictly for any one purpose. For instance, any biography or autobiography will be read as personal interest to understand the life story of an individual. The same maybe read by a research scholar for his research purpose. People’s interest in reading is so varied, that any text could meet any purpose.

The chapter has been taken from Business Communication of SMU MBA MB0023. It is the next chapter of how to listen customer complaints.

How to Listen Customer Complaints from MB0023 Business Communication of SMU MBA

A career in any industry, be it at the front office, managing the other staff or dealing with customers, can be managed smoothly if one develops his/her listening skills, especially when facing customer complaints. Listening skills have to be mastered because the customers you face are not the same always. You may come across a customer, who is drunk, may get belligerent or even violent if offended. You may sometimes come across another category of customers who are not satisfied with the treatment that they have received. These also should be attended with patient hearing.

Handling customer complaints need not have to be a battle always. With the right tools and responses you can turn complaints to your advantage; to help you build your business. How do you deal with your customer complaints? The easiest way to find out is to pick up the phone and play the role of the complaining customer. If you are very much irritated with the service you get or if the person on the other side doesn’t listen to your complaints, would you return to the same place? In such cases, you need to create a standardized method for dealing with your complainers and turn them into loyal customers.

One of the great tools used in the connection is the technique of BLAST. The acronym stands for:

Believe: This is the cornerstone of handling a customer complaint. The customers may be lying and be incorrect about their situation. It is important to understand that your customers believe that your establishment was wronged them.

Listen: Stop and listen to your customer’s complaint. While listening, engage in active listening where you either nod or repeat some words to assure the customer that you are ‘really’ listening to the complaint.

Apologize: Always apologize even if you did nothing wrong. From your customers’ perspective, they have a legitimate complaint, and they expect an apology.

Satisfy: Satisfied customer not only returns to your organization for a second time, but also advertises about his satisfaction to many of his friends and thereby improves your business!

Thank: At the beginning, at the end, in the middle; it doesn’t matter thank the customer for calling and complaining.

The chapter has also been taken from Business Communication of MBA MB0023 of SMU. It is the sequel of listening activities and strategies for effective listening.

Listening Activities for MBA MB0023 of SMU Business Communication

Now since the time supermarkets began, marketing consultants, like us, have been gathering information about customer’s shopping habits.

To date, various research methods have been used to help promote the sales of supermarket products. There is, for example, the simple and direct questionnaire which provides information from customers about their views on displays and products and then helps retailers make decisions about what to put where.

Another method to help managers understand just how shoppers go around their stores are the hidden television cameras that film us as we shop and monitor our physical movement around the supermarket aisles: where do we start, what do we buy last, what attracts us, etc.

More sophisticated techniques now include video surveillance and such devices as the eye movement recorder. This is a device which shoppers volunteer to wear taped into a headband, and which traces their eye movements as they walk round the shop recording the most eye-catching areas of shelves and aisles.

But with today’s technology, Space Management is now a highly sophisticated method of manipulating the way we shop to ensure maximum profit. Supermarkets are able to invest millions of pounds in powerful computers which tell them what sells best and where.

Now, an example of this is ‘Spaceman’ which is a computer programme that helps the retailer to decide which particular product sells best in which part of the store. Now Spaceman works by receiving information from the electronic checkouts on how well a product is selling in a particular position. Spaceman then suggests the most profitable combination of an article and its position in the store.

So, let’s have a look at what we know about supermarkets and the way people behave when they walk down the aisles and take the articles they think they need from the shelves.

After listening and barriers to effective listening, the chapter has also been taken from the SMU Business Communication for MBA MB0023.

Strategies for Effective Listening from MB0023 of SMU MBA

Although the reasons for breakdowns in listening are numerous, there are many ways to improve listening skills. You can improve your listening skills by following some of the strategies mentioned below:

Maintain eye contact with the speaker: Eye contact keeps you focused on the job at hand and keeps you involved in the lecture/speech.

Provide clues that you are actively involved in listening: Clues that you are actively listening can go a long way. It is important to make the speaker feel that you care about what he/she is saying.

Focus on content, not delivery: Have you ever counted the number of times a teacher clears his/her throat in a fifteen minutes period? If so, you weren’t focusing on content.

Avoid emotional involvement: When you are too emotionally involved in listening, you tend to hear what you want to hear-not what is actually being said.

Avoid distractions: Don’t let your mind wander or be distracted by anything. It is necessary that you must concentrate. Concentration requires willingness and practice. Practicing active listening helps to develop concentration but there are other elements that contribute to your ability to concentrate on what someone is saying.

Refrain from formulating an immediate response: It is important to refrain from formulating an immediate response. Let yourself finish listening before you begin to speak.

Ask questions: If you are not sure you understand what the speaker has said, just ask. It is a good idea to repeat in your own words what the speaker said, so that you can be sure your understanding is correct.

Use the gap between the rate of speech and your rate of thought: You can think faster than the speaker can talk. That’s one reason why your mind may tend to wander. All the above suggestions will help you keep your mind occupied and focused on what is being said.

Be willing to accept revisions: It will keep the communication process running smoothly. Often people are so busy trying to defend their positions that they fail to really stop and think whether they could be improved upon or viewed in a different way.

Choose the right environment: It is important because it will help the listener focus on what he is listening and avoid distractions. Although you cannot always create or call an environment ‘perfect’ for all types of communication, in general, it is best to avoid areas where there are high levels of activity, loud noises, an uncomfortable temperature, poor air flow, etc.

Stay active by asking questions for yourself: Active listening keeps you on your toes. Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you listen: What key point is the speaker making? How does this fit with what I already know? How is this lecture/speech organized?

Treat listening as a challenging mental task: Listening to an academic lecture is not a passive act at least it shouldn’t be. You need to concentrate on what is said so that you can process the information thoroughly.

Barriers to Effective Listening from SMU MBA MB0023 of Business Communication

Listening is the most important part of the communication process. However, listening skills do not come naturally to most people; these require willingness, practice and patience to develop on the part of the person, who wishes to acquire these skills.

There are many reasons as to why individuals fail to listen successfully. These include:

Interrupting is a problem for many reasons. First, it is an aggressive behavior and will most likely bring a negative response from the speaker being interrupted.

Faking attention and tuning out can be offensive and is usually hard to hide. This hurts the speaker as it sends him the message that the listener doesn’t really care about what the speaker is saying.

Becoming emotional can hinder one’s ability to listen. It is important that the receiver be aware of his or her emotions.

Jumping to conclusions is often considered as the most common barrier to listening. The listening, to be effective, should be done with full attention to whatever the speaker has to say.

Getting distracted is common while trying to communicate. Often, one has many tasks to do or there is a lot of other activity taking place while someone is trying to communicate.

Pre-judging the subject: Often, instead of listening to the speaker, many people tend to assume that the subject is boring or dull. During any conversation, presentation or speech, they turn their attention to other things or simply day-dream.

Wrong focus: Another barrier of listening is the focus of the listener on appearance and delivery of the speaker. The listeners observe the appearance and the delivery style of speaker instead of listening to what is being said.

Gathering only facts: Many people listen to gather facts instead or trying to understand the underlying idea and integrated it with non-verbal communication.

Inflexibility while listening: Many formal speeches are not carefully outlined and organized.

Avoiding complicated subjects: When the subject is technical or complicated, many people stop listening altogether.

The strategies that one has to develop in order to be a good listener are: Providing clues that one is actively involved, concentrating while someone is talking, refraining from formulating an immediate response, trying to prepare beforehand, being prepared to accept revisions and being sure that the environment is conducive to listening.