I was engaged in a conversation recently about why communication plays such an important role in the world of service. It was an interesting discussion and allowed me the opportunity to share my definition of effective communication for the service business.

The quality of our communication is relied on to assess our competence

The quality of our communication is a major source of information that our customers rely on to evaluate our competence and the value of our work. As an intangible service, it is almost impossible for a customer to accurately evaluate actual work quality or competence directly. For example, if it takes us one hour to troubleshoot a problem, how does the customer know that the hour spent was amazing and that it would have taken anyone else a day or more to figure out the problem? The answer is that they don’t really know, so they look to their perception of the quality of our communication as an important input that they use to assess our competence.