IMPROVE YOUR COMMUNICATION SKILLS FOR 1 HOUR A WEEK ORGANIZEDTHOUGHT
Day 3: Listen Find a podcast that delivers high-quality, meaty content to listeners — This American Life is a great place to start. Devote 15 minutes to listening. Ideally, these 15 minutes should be quiet and free of distraction. Actively listen to what the hosts and guests have to say. The key is to remain attentive. Day 4: Write Email is a derided but necessary form of communication. Clutter tends to fill both our inboxes and the messages themselves. Your goal is to become clear and concise. In five minutes, find a wordy email someone sent to you. Rewrite it. Make it to the point and something you would actually want to read. Day 5: Review Have a trusted friend or coworker read over one of your emails or listen to one of your presentations. Ask for honest, constructive criticism. How can the message be improved? The delivery? Listen attentively to the feedback and put it into practice.
We are surrounded by tools designed to make us better communicators. Unfortunately, many of us don’t take advantage of them. So we miss out on improving our communication, whether it’s with our significant other, our children, our neighbors, or our colleagues. Here’s the truth: The secret to being a better communicator is as close as a click away. All you need is one hour every week. Over the course of five days, do these five things, and you will be surprised by the results. Day 1: Watch Start your week with a presentation, but not any ordinary, boring one. Give yourself 20 minutes to watch a TED Talk on YouTube, for instance. Pick one and go. Observe how the presentation plays out. Watch how the speaker delivers their message, engages the audience, and takes a potentially dry topic and turns it into something you actually want to watch. Day 2: Read You can spend any given day sifting through repetitive emails and uninspired content. Instead, take 10 minutes to read content created by a famous reporter or popular blogger. Your goal is to find someone with a penchant for writing who has a clear understanding of what they want to communicate to their readers. Then, get inside their head. How do they structure paragraphs and sentences? What words do they choose? How do they get their point across? What makes their writting effective or ineffective?
All you need is an hour a week to start communicating more clearly and effectively.
‘HOWCAN I HELP YOU?’ HOW TO INCORPORATE CHATBOTS INTO YOUR BUSINESS
People have long been curious about what robots could do for humans. Historians have even traced robotic inventions all the way back to 400 B.C.! Since then, the field of robotics has come a long way and brought modern society inventions that change how people live, learn, and even run their businesses. One such robotic innovation that has increased in popularity in recent years is the chatbot. According to Entrepreneur.com, Facebook found that over 2 billion conversations were held between customers and
ever. According to Newlands, you can even create your own bot on Facebook Messenger without having to write any code.
To dip your toes into the chatbot world, start by establishing a part-time bot during a busy season, or use one to reduce the number of common and simple questions your employees have to answer. This delegation of inquiries will allow your employees to focus on more pressing tasks. Additionally, your chatbots can bridge language barriers and assist clients who struggle with verbal communication. While chatbot technology has various benefits, it also has limititations. Before you dive right in, make sure you’re aware of how much your chatbot can do for your customer before a human customer service representative has to step in. Many inquiries require human interaction, so monitor your chatbot’s responses, program your chatbot to direct customers to you or your team, and let customers know your bots are only designed for certain tasks. Your bot has to be easy to understand, or no one will use it. A lot has changed since 400 B.C. Technology is advancing fast, and when businesses don’t keep up with the times, they fail. If you use it effectively, chatbot customer service is a phenomenon that will surely keep your business a bot above the rest.
the 100,000 chatbots on its messenger platform in 2017. But though chatbots have only become mainstream in the last few years, they’ve been around for decades.
Chatbots go all the way back to 1966, when Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA terrified and mystified the masses. ELIZA was the first chatbot to master short, human-like conversations, and various improvements were made in the following decades, including ALICE in 1995. ALICE’s capabilities were so profound that she paved the way for today’s widely used artificial intelligence inventions. Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, IBM’s Watson, and Google Home are all forms of AI chatbots that utilize human-like linguistics, but according to Murray Newlands, CEO of chatbot company Chatty People, bots can also take on scripted forms. These bots are ideal for answering common, simple questions from customers. Today, implementing a chatbot for your business is more convenient than
2
www.mometrixmedia.com
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online