Analyzing Messages - Communication 470

Analyzing Messages

Effective communication, either virtual or natural, is an integral part of our daily lives. As an employee for an airline company and as a Team Leader for a major credit card company, I know good communication is a very important part of my professional life. As a reservation agent, my communication skills allow me to provide good customer service at all times. As a Team Leader for a credit card company, I know that effective communicator also means effective leader because an effective leader provides clear, accurate, and relevant information that employees can use to their benefits. But for a communication to be effective, according to our textbook, one must be aware of the various components of the communication process which are: sender, receiver, message, channel, feedback, environment and noise (Roebuck & McKenney, 2006).

For the purpose of this paper, I will concentrate on three messages that I received and responded at Discover Card. As a Team Leader, I am receiving and sending emails on a daily basis. Since written communication is not my strength, I prefer to have a quick team meeting or quick team huddle to relay information. However, most of the times, sending, receiving, and responding to emails have been my primary methods of communications..

The first message that I am going to analyze is a message I received from my Department Manager, who is the sender of the email. She sent the email to request an action plan on how my team can effectively impact our results for the month of June. The message was simple and to the point - she wanted an action plan from me, the receiver. The channel that was used was through email and in this scenario, the environment and noise were not really relevant because of the method the message was sent. She sent and marked the email as a priority so I emailed her an immediate feedback and action plan.

The second message was a voicemail from a customer. The customer left a message on my voicemail requesting that his payment for the following day be deleted because he did not have enough funds to cover the amount. Again, with this message, although it was done over the phone, and the customer only left a voicemail, the request was also clear and simple. The environment in which the request was made also worked to the customer's favor because he called the day before the payment was set up and since it has not been processed yet, the timing was perfect. Again, the noise was not relevant and did not make any impact with the way the message was left by the customer and the way I received it. The major difference with this messages from the first one that I analyzed was, due to the customer's account status, I had to call him back and renegotiated a smaller payment amount that was beneficial to him and Discover Card. When I called the customer back, and renegotiated for another payment, the whole communication process started over again - me being the sender and the customer being the receiver this time.

The third message was a one-on-one conversation with an employee. The employee wanted to discuss some concerns about being able to work with a new Team Negotiator that is being placed with our team. Unfortunately, this communication turned out to be very ineffective because the sender of the message (the employee) did not disclose the reasons he has concerns working with this person. The message was not very clear because he just mentioned personality conflict and nothing concrete that I (the receiver) could work with in trying