The most difficult aspect of effective communication is understanding what information needs to be communicated by who and to whom (and when).  Those of us working in the service arena need to understand our role in the customer/provider relationship.  We need to fully empathize with our customers' needs and focus on finding timely solutions for their problems.  Too often it is perceived that so-and-so calls frantically whenever there's a crisis and complains until things are resolved, but never follows up to say "thanks" or "nice job."  But what do things look like from their perspective?

Adelaide is Belladonna's secretary.  Belladonna has an important campus-wide presentation to make at 9:00am and need ten copies of the latest Word document to hand out to the committee members.  It's only 8:15am and Adelaide promises to have them ready in thirty minutes.  Adelaide is comfortable making this promise since she's very competent with basic PC skills and has worked on and printed hundreds of Word documents.

Scenario 1: Adelaide tries to pull up the Word document and she gets an error message saying "File not found."  She frowns and tries it again but gets the same result.  It's 8:20am and she's starting to panic a little bit.  Belladonna will be furious if the hand-outs aren't ready and Adelaide will be mortified that she let her boss down.

Scenario 2: Adelaide pulls up the Word document and clicks on "Print".  She gets an error message saying "Unable to print file."  She frowns and tries it again but gets the same result.  It's 8:20am and she's starting to panic a little bit.  Belladonna will be furious if the hand-outs aren't ready and Adelaide will be mortified that she let her boss down.

Scenario 3: Adelaide pulls up the Word document and clicks on "Print".  Everything looks normal so she's proceeds to the printer which is flashing "Error" on its display.  This has never happened before and she's not sure what she should do.  Adelaide doesn't want to do anything that might make things worse.  It's 8:20am and she's starting to panic a little bit.  Belladonna will be furious if the hand-outs aren't ready and Adelaide will be mortified that she let her boss down.

In each of these scenarios, Adelaide frantically calls the Help Desk and either gushes a great sigh of relief and thanks when it's quickly fixed or suffers a minor nervous breakdown as she tells her boss at 8:45am that there's been some sort of problem.  Belladonna now feels thrown off of the presentation she had planned.  She now has to explain to the committee that the IT department couldn't get the printer fixed and, as a result, she has no hand-outs for the members.

For each of these scenarios, think about what information absolutely needs to be communicated and what information is irrelevant.  Then answer the following questions:

Question 1:
Pretend that you are Adelaide.  What information are you interested in during this momentary crisis in your life?
Question 2:
Pretend that you are Belladonna.  What information are you interested in during this momentary crisis in your life?Question 3:
Pretend that you are the Help Desk.  You've got a frantic customer (Adelaide) on the phone who needs immediate help ... what information do you need from them?  What information do you give to them?