Communication: listening and learning

Patrick McGillycuddy, Head of Fleet at Škoda, explains the importance of communication between fleet managers and drivers.

Good communication is essential for a successful business. Getting the correct messages to both your customers and your employees makes for a smooth running business.

In business keeping employees informed and happy means they’re far more willing to do what you want and need. We all know that a member of staff who understands what their employer want to achieve – be it maximum compliance with health and safety regulations or simply making sure that drivers refuel at the lowest priced garages – is far more likely to work with you than ignore you or worse, go against the flow.

But good communication isn’t just about bombarding people with information. Listening and understanding is also part of the process. Indeed, this element of communication is becoming increasingly important because with electronic forms of messaging, we have the ability to communicate on an individual, targeted, basis at the right time and not just telling everyone everything. This way the message can be more useful and therefore, more powerful.

If you don’t do this, the message can be seen as spam – something we’re all sensitive to, be it email or just information overload.

A good example is the supermarkets. At any one time they have a multitude of good offers, but if they told every shopper about every offer, not only would the relevant and useful messages get lost in a blizzard, but it could even put shoppers off coming back to that store.

In other words, if you’ve got kids and buy a lot of small, round, red wax-coated cheeses for lunchboxes (is it just my kids?) then an offer on these will get me back into the store, but an offer on energy drinks may not.

I've been working to make sure Skoda's communications are helpful and relevant. So if, for instance, you run a diesel-only fleet, we won’t bombard you with details of our petrol range.

We only want to send you information that serves your needs, rather than broadcast all our messages to all our customers. Then if you want more information we’ve made it easier for you to contact us by increasing our fleet team – which means they can talk to more people – and give better access to our demo fleet.

We’re listening to our customers and sharing the right information internally. And if we’re listening well, then we’ll be providing useful information that will help provide useful and powerful information and not bombarding people with spam.