6 signs your telecoms teams aren’t reading your internal comms and what you can do about it
Are your telecoms teams constantly out of the loop, and you feel like you’re hitting a brick wall trying to get through to everyone?
You’re posting consistently, yet you’re still hearing the same questions about topics you’ve spoken about in your comms, you’re tired of feeling like your messages aren’t being read, and it’s so frustrating.
You could be facing an internal communications crisis which is bad news for your telecoms business.
In fact, a study released by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that communication issues were the root cause of the following problems; 54% said stress, 44% said delay or failure to complete projects, and 25% said they missed performance goals because of poor communication.
So, if you’re wondering whether your telecoms teams are reading your comms, here are a few signs which indicate they might not be.
1. Processes and best practices are never followed
If your telecoms teams are constantly doing things differently than your company’s best practice, then this is a sign of communication issues.
Yes, you’re publishing content about your processes, so why aren’t people putting them into practice? Chances are that they are skimming your articles or just not reading them at all.
How to overcome this internal comms problem?
A great way to ensure your content around processes is read is to break it down into step-by-step guides.
For example, our clients use our interactive step-by-step articles so employees can jump straight to the section they need. Breaking it into small chunks also means your staff are more likely to read it because they can find the sections that are most relevant to them.
2. Your telecoms team don’t know your latest products or offers
If you were to stop one of your sales team randomly and ask them what your latest offers were, would they know?
This is easy to do.
Leave your office and pay your frontline sales team a visit. Ask them if they know about your products and offers. If the majority of them are unaware, then you’ve got a communication issue on your hands.
We know that sales teams are busy, especially in the telecoms industry, but making them aware of your latest products and offers is crucial to their selling success.
So how can you make sure they read and remember your latest products and offers?
#1 Make it easy for them to stay updated
Are your comms getting lost in a sea of information? If they’re being posted by email on WhatsApp or your work intranet, which has no way of guiding employees to what they need to read, then you could be stuck with the same problem for years to come.
We recommend using a platform which guides employees on what they need to read so that staying updated is always simple and easy. For example, our comms platform Engage has features which make it quick for employees to see what they missed, banners to bring important news to the forefront and a personalised news feed, so they only see the news that’s relevant to them and their team.
Virgin Media delivers its comms with our internal comms platform and has seen a 99% usage rate across its entire sales team.
#2 Include acknowledgements on your important articles
Most modern comms platforms include acknowledgements whereby you get an employee to tick that they have read and understood your articles to ensure people aren’t ignoring them or skim-reading them.
Simply including this statement that your employees have to agree to makes them more inclined to ensure they are not just reading the article but properly understanding it.
Best of all, you can see who is and isn’t acknowledging, which means you can nudge those not engaging with your posts.
#3 Incorporate quick training with your comms
We know what you’re thinking, ‘I haven’t got time to publish training and content’. With Ocasta Engage, you don’t have to; any piece of content you post on the internal comms platform can be automatically turned into a quick microlearning module.
Simply post your content and then tick the option to turn it into a 2-minute quiz or task where you can ask employees to complete an activity related to your topic.
3. Hardly any employees show up to your events
So, you decide to hold a training workshop on sales techniques for telecoms teams. But when the day comes, hardly anyone has turned up. “But I announced it” we hear you say? Sorry to break it to you, but that just isn’t enough; internal comms is about knowing when to strategically announce your message many times throughout the day or week.
How to overcome this internal comms problem?
It’s not enough to announce it once on a Monday and expect your teams to remember, let alone turn up. You must remind, nudge and persuade people as many times as you can. If you have a lot of no-shows at your company events, it’s a sign that you need to up the frequency of your comms.
4. Customers are complaining
When you work within internal comms, it can be easy to separate yourself from customer complaints, but they can be a sign that your comms aren’t being read.
If you’re posting communications about customer service best practices, sales techniques and your company ethos, but your team isn’t listening to you, then their service will be bad. That results in customer complaints, and it’s your job to rectify it.
How to overcome this internal comms problem?
To encourage the readership of your comms, we suggest incorporating rewards and recognition into your strategy. Reward those employees who are constantly engaged with your content to encourage them to stay in the loop. This motivates your top-performing employees and encourages your lower-performing employees to do better.
5. Important content is kept in different places
If your staff can’t find the information they’re looking for because it’s not easily accessible, then it’s likely your telecoms teams aren’t reading your content.
Do you keep your brand values in a folder tucked away, your health and safety procedures on a poster in the staff room and your customer service policies on your intranet? When news is spread out in different places, it makes it hard for your employees to keep up with what they need to know, and as a result, they won’t bother.
How to overcome this internal comms problem?
Use a platform which allows you to keep everything in one place. Next, Virgin Media O2 and Tesco Mobile use Engage for their internal communications. They can publish all content, digital handbooks, alerts, announcements and recognition to encourage readership. And it happens all in one place.
It also means that they track all engagement rates from every piece of content from one dashboard, making it easy to see who’s read what.
6. Everyone’s priorities are different
When communication within an organisation is strong, it usually means that everyone’s priorities are aligned. When your staff aren’t reading your communications, you find that everyone has a different idea of what they think is most important to get done.
For example, your sales team might be stressing about upselling to existing customers. But your boss is more concerned about the low level of engagement rates across your health and safety training.
How to overcome this internal comms problem?
A good way to overcome this is to send out weekly summaries. In these summaries, your heads of departments should state what their biggest strengths and concerns were from the previous week. This way, everyone will know what challenges they need to start addressing for the week ahead.
The Engage platform makes it quick and easy for employees to see unread news. With every piece of content you post, there’s a small marker which highglights whether they have engaged with it or not. For all the items they haven’t yet read, they’ll be placed in a personalised news feed making it easy for them to stay updated.
How to really tell if your telecoms team are reading your internal comms?
Use a platform which allows you to see exactly who’s reading and who’s not. No matter which piece of content you post, a news item, article, or alert, you should be able to see the engagement rate and who is and isn’t engaging.
This allows you to effortlessly tweak and refine your communication strategy in an effort to boost your engagement levels over time.
If you think it could be a good fit for your organisation, try it for free for 60 days.
Here’s how the free pilot works:
A personalised, quick demo to check we're both a good fit for each other
If that goes well, a 60-day pilot in the field with your pilot sales team
If you’re happy with the pilot, you can launch it across your entire sales team
Join the likes of Next and Virgin Media O2, who all use our internal comms app to improve internal comms and increase sales.
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