As a global person, we must have across situations when we are calling our clients or prospects and all we get into is a Voice Mailbox. Though I have seen many sales people leaving their messages and follow up next. But this is something missing from people from technical or other departments. I am not saying they do not do it, but the proportion is lower than compared to sales.
This is sometimes easy to be forgiven, as what we can think of how does it matter. It does, and the only think which we do here is - not communicating properly.
See it this way. Your client or prospect is a human being. Like any other human being, s/he also gets all those annoying calls from bank representatives for Credit Card, or s/he is busy driving and can be fined for taking the call while driving. Consider this, you call someone and you get into a voice mailbox. What does it mean? You will all say, s/he is busy to take the call. But what you miss is, the person has set up voice mailbox as s/he also wants to attend to all calls which could not be attended for one reason or another.
I myself get many calls from many who have called, but no voice message. I do not respond to those unless I know the person from my Contacts list. But I do listen to all voicemails I get. Then it depends on me if I want to reply or not. Same way I think my client or prospect will do.
If I hear a voice message, I would like to know 3 things - WHO called, WHY s/he called, and WHEN can I get back to the caller. And I do the same when I call someone and get to a voice mailbox.
Technology is changing fast, but human interaction through voice is still the best mode of communication. Catch on to it, as only a voice can exert the emotion, urgency and all other stuff which text communication cannot.
So next time you reach a voice mailbox, do leave a message. Don’t wait for the person to get back to you but follow up the other day or so.
Small thing but surely adds on to your communication Skill.
