A year ago, I was working as a Sales assistant for a branding company. My job description mostly encompassed communicating with customers, and my immediate supervisor. On a typical day, the customer would make an order through the website or email, and I would communicate the same message via email to the supervisor. However, on this particular day, the order made by the customer was urgent and I had to reach out to the supervisor physically to pass the same message by word of mouth. The supervisor was busy talking to another client online, hence, I had to ask him if it was a good time to talk. Looking back at the aftermath of whole situation, I think my then supervisor got an illusion of competence as described by David Glenn (2010) and Van de Loo (2016) where he thought he would still process the message that I had while simultaneously talking to the other client online. The client had ordered branded baseball caps worth $75,000 to be delivered in two days. After passing the message I went back to my office desk and proceeded with the rest of the day’s tasks. However, three days later, I found a tone of messages in my email and negative customer messages on the website tagging my name.
Apparently, the supervisor had heard that the client had asked for an order of $7,000 which according to the company policies takes between 5-7 days to be delivered, that is, for orders below $10,000. Begley (2009) states that sound notifications such as arrival of texts and emails distracts a person’s ability to give full attention to a speaker, and I strongly feel it is the same thing that happened to the supervisor. The supervisor did not get any information about the two days delivery deadline and only grasped half of the whole message, which also, he did not get it correctly (Adler & Proctor, 2014). Initially, my supervisor thought I was to blame for the situation given the possibility that I might not have communicated the information accurately. However, on the same day, another sales assistant had communicated to him about an order worth $50,000 and he had also delayed authorizing for deliveries. In that situation, we tried our best asking the customer for a day to prepare for dispatch of the baseball caps but they declined and cancelled the order. Therefore, we ended up having branded products worth $125,000 without having people to buy them, hence, a loss of $125,000 that could have been avoided by good listening.
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Good listening skills are important and more fundamental in communication environments that are sensitive to information, for instance, my line of work. The best thing the supervisor would have done in that scenario was to either ask for an additional ten minutes to clear up with the client he was talking with online first, or ask me to note down the message on a card on his desk. In this manner, the situation would have turned out differently. In the first instance, I would have come later where he would have ample time to discuss about the new client order. In the second instance, noting down the message on a piece of paper would have made it easier for him to recall important details for the new order.
References
Arenson, K. W. (2002). The fine art of listening. New York Time, 13, 34-35
Adler, R. B., Rosenfeld, L. B., & Proctor, R. F. (2012). Interplay: The process pf International Communication.
Van de Loo, E. (2016). The art of listening. In Coach and couch (pp. 121-137). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
