Communication Channels or Options

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season when we're looking at mistakes, errors, missteps, and all kinds of other things that were just simply steps to success. A way for us to learn and move forward and get better. This episode, we are going to talk about communication channels or options. This again is something that I have had a few different situations and stories in my path that either directly that I had or lived through or experienced and viewed. I'm going to go with one in specific because I think it again highlights sort of where things can go wrong. This story begins with a customer. I'd contact him and I don't remember how I initially got a hold of them. But suffice it to say, it was somehow through the primary method of communication was through telephone, was through phone calls. And at this point, I had a business, essentially a cell phone that was used for business. And that was my primary method of communication. There were, I want to say, a couple of emails sent. But for the most part, this was a situation where I worked with one consultant or contractor and primarily the information that we dealt with as far as communication with the customer. Was on like phone calls, you know, teleconferences and things like that. No face to face. Never met these people. I don't even remember how close or far they were to be geographically. But you know, the key here is that we had had we had a couple of weeks of about weekly calls that were design discussions. And there were some there were some deliverables. There were some things that were placed. I think I believe it was just placed on a server. It wasn't necessarily emailed to him. It was just, hey, here you go. Here's some here's some information or here's some documentation code, whatever it happened to be that I was delivering at the time. Now the challenge came. Well, I guess let me start with the mistake. The mistake I made was. Leaving that that phone number was my the primary way to get a hold of me. And it was really was the only way that they had any real contact with me. They just decided, hey, we're going to call this phone number now. Since they did have other information, I can email address. There were other opportunities for them to contact me. However, they went through phone. And this was back when phone was a people had cell phones and stuff like that. It's probably, I don't know, 15 years back, maybe, maybe 10, something like that. I probably closer to 10 years back. So while there were many ways to communicate people, most people still had landlines and telephone was was pretty common. Now, of course, I had cell phones, so I wasn't worried about a landline. The challenge, though, was that I started in. I ended up in a bunch of cell phone issues. I had like a phone number that's trying to transfer over. And it took a while. And in doing so, I lost connectivity for I had spotty connectivity for a while, like while being a couple of weeks. Now during this time, I had sent some some documents that were basically, hey, here's your essentially it's like here's a proposal. Here's some of the things that have been done. Let me know what your thoughts are. And promptly, because they weren't they weren't like the primary customer I was working with at the time, I sort of moved on to other things and figured, hey, they'll get back to me when they get back to me. Well, you've blast forward a couple of weeks and I hadn't heard from them while. And finally, I get an email or I maybe even reached out with email and said, hey, you know what's going on? Turns out they had tried to contact me a couple of times and had left voicemails. But because of the phone issues I was running into. Missed them. I was not able I didn't hear them, didn't get them, had no availability, no ability to even listen to them after I knew that they were there. It was one of the things they were just sort of lost in the ether. And this ended up being an issue because there was some some time sensitivity to the project. And as far as they were concerned, I just flaked out and went dark for a couple of weeks. So by the time that we got to I got back on track, as far as we got back in contact, they had essentially gotten a point where they they sort of had to move on. And I can't remember if they just canceled the project or had found another another contractor. But it ended up being something where there's definitely some loss to me because I had put forward some work, had started this project for them and got paid for whatever work I did. It's not like they didn't pay or anything. But it was something that it was a loss on both sides because I could have moved forward and had a probably what would have been a look like it was well positioned to be a successful engagement. And they would have had their their deliverables, their solution on time and not have to go through the headache of finding another another resource and all of the other things that went on. And then just the stress of you reach out to somebody and you don't get a response back. Now there is part of this is I'm going to say on them because they did have other ways to get a hold of me. And I've seen other situations where it's even worse in this case, at least I had given them more than one way to get a hold of me. Now in the past, I've had a couple of situations, especially if you go back even earlier in my career, where and I see this a lot now, too, where there's really one way that somebody likes to be contacted, for example, email. So you get into a particularly it may be a professional type of thing, whether it's your employer or maybe you're doing some side hustle or something like that, where email is is the only thing that you provide. If your email server goes down or any of the various issues that can come up or if they just have the wrong email address, you know, if yours is, you know, cars dot com, but your actual email is, you know, car dot com or something like that, those things, those mistakes can easily be made. And then there's no way if you don't have multiple communication channels, there's no way for them to go verify that. But also on me is the follow up side of things. There's definitely a timeliness to our communications. So if you send something out and you expect it in a certain amount of time or expect at least a response in a certain amount of time and you don't get it, then you need to follow up and say, hey, you know, I sent this just checking to make sure that you received it. And even if there's not a. Like an urgency of time, but just a like a respect of time, you know, essentially like, hey, I'm sending you this proposal. It may take you a couple of days to take a look at it. It doesn't hurt even though you're not expecting the, you know, the ultimate response for days or maybe even weeks. It doesn't hurt to follow up a day or two later just to say, hey, I sent this. I just want to confirm that you got it. I want to make sure that there were no problems that you, you know, you could read the documents, you could download stuff that needs to be downloaded. You could use, you know, view the links that were provided, whatever. Just to sort of tap them on the shoulder again and say, hey, can you just let me know that you got this? Now, some places that's part of their their procedures, their standards is that if they get an email, they respond back and just say, hey, I received your email or thank you or something along those lines. But some people don't. In some cases, there is a like a read receipt or something like that, that they just trust that that's going to be that's going to be enough. And we've had some of the other stories, some of the other mistakes that we've looked at that are along those same lines where it is useful to ensure that whoever you are communicating with has received that communication. And we can talk about deeper ways to validate communication and verify that they're on the same page and clarity. But in this case, this is the simplest first step. And that first one being one, make sure you always provide more than one way for a customer or employer to get a hold of you. Ideally should be like, you know, two phone numbers, maybe like if you have a home number and a cell phone and an email address or maybe two email addresses. And if there's other ways that are very common to be contacted, maybe it's maybe it's a customer and it's through your website or you've got a whatever social site, social network like a I don't know whether it's a Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or whatever it is, some way that says this is a method that I check. That's the key to is that you check regularly enough so somebody contacts you. They will be able to get a response in a reasonable amount of time. Now, a little bonus, I guess, level to that would be to add where you can to any of those communication methods, a way to also forward or copy the communication to somewhere else. For example, if you have a company site that has a contact form and those contact entries go into a database that you can check somewhere, you probably should have also if you can do it and most allow this a way to send like at least an email to an address or multiple addresses that says, hey, you got, you know, you got a some sort of a contact form, go take a look at it or maybe just forward the entire message. And this goes for voicemails and phone as well. That's why it's nice to have some of these places like a grasshopper and some of those where there's a number that can be called into. But then you can store it. You can email the you can forward it on to phone numbers of various sorts. Or other voicemails so that you have the capability wherever you are to verify that somebody's got a hold of you, because, yes, we don't always want to be contacted. We want to have those moments where we can disconnect. But other than those moments, we do want to be able to be contacted and to know that somebody is trying to reach out to us. And, you know, on both sides of this story, the other thing is, like I said, is if somebody is not responding, you send something and they don't respond in the normal amount of time, try an alternate method. You should have it. And this is even when you're starting these relationships, not only should you provide multiple ways to contact them, request that you get multiple ways, whether it's a phone number and an email or whatever it happens to be. It may be like it may even be like a Slack channel or something like that. But this is something I've also run into. It's just the timeliness. Sometimes you send an email and people don't check email all the time, but it is urgent in some way. And so you need a method that's more likely to get a hold of them, which may be a text or a phone number. And that's why a lot of people do that. They say, hey, send an email, but maybe in the email, there's an auto responder that says, hey, I received this. If I'll respond in 24 hours, if I don't or if you need a response sooner, here is an alternate method of contact or communication. And that tends to work pretty well, particularly if you've got a like a work communication contact point, but then sometimes you want to allow that to go to, you know, more of a personal kind of thing. So maybe it's a you have a work email, say, hey, you know, I'm I only work nine to five Monday to Friday or whatever it is. If you need something sooner, you can reach me at this other email or at this phone or at this phone number. Allow because we have so many ways to communicate, allow people to use that. Take advantage of it. Obviously, again, you know, we have those moments where we don't want to be contacted. But, you know, like if you've got a phone that you can get texts and you can do phone and email and maybe even check your website and you don't want to be contacted, then go put the phone away. Don't take the phone with you. And you can you can go dark for a while. And I guess that's sort of like the extra side note to this is that you can go dark. People don't have to reach you all the time, 24 7 within seconds or something like that. You can have points where, OK, it's going to wait. Now, if you're if you're a doctor, surgeon or something, yeah, there may be life and death things, but most of what we do is not. So, you know, take that into account as well. So maybe that because you may have somebody that abuses that and they reach out and contact you at all kinds of different times and hours and methods. And they just disrupting your life because they don't respect that. You know, you do have a life outside of whatever their their communication stuff is. This happens to be, you know, family member, your spouse or something like that. Sorry, that's they are part of your life. So you're just going to have to accept that. But if it's a customer, if it's business related, if it's your boss, there are. Established boundaries. And that's where it doesn't hurt to have maybe two or three different ways to contact you, some of which you only check maybe during work hours. And if somebody needs to get a hold of you separately, maybe even just say, I am only going to be checking Monday through Friday. I don't check email on weekends. So if you send something late Friday or Saturday or Sunday, just apologies. But I will get to it when I get in the office Monday. And hopefully most people I've run into will respect that enough and they'll just say, OK, no big deal. I just wanted to rip my email off and you can respond when you get a chance. So I think that's it keeps this one a little bit simple and sort of short. But well, I guess not totally short, but. That's a that's the thing that we want to just think about, because sometimes we throw out a business card or something like that, just real easy, and then don't think about the contacts. But there is. A level of. Style or professionalism or class or whatever you want to call it, where we want to make sure that if we have somebody we are supposed to communicate with or we need to communicate with them or they need to communicate with us, that we have. Gone through the logical steps of making sure that we do have unless it's inappropriate, a couple of ways to get a hold of them. We have provided those and we follow up, whether it is a response to requests they make or whether we are just ensuring that what we sent them was readable. And, you know, they the message was received, whatever message it is that we sent. And that being said, I just have one message to send you at this point, and that is to go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. One more thing before you go, Develop-a-Noor podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developer.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. 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