Customer Communication Training

Yesterday and this morning, I participated in a training on “customer communication” organized by the company.

In my work, coding accounts for about 35%, task management, operation and maintenance, etc. account for 30%, and communication takes up about 35%.

I’m involved in a development project for anomaly detection and am also in charge of two DevOps - related tools. A few months ago, I started to be responsible for the global support work of our team. I often need to communicate with users to understand their usage and feedback, which helps me make improvements. I also do some work related to user behavior analysis based on logs and traffic. For the scenarios and problems analyzed, I need to communicate with users to confirm if my analysis is correct. Although a colleague helps me with some simple and repetitive communication tasks, generally speaking, communication is still very important to me. That’s why I signed up for this training.

Another reason for signing up for this training is that it’s in English. I don’t know why, but since the beginning of this year, I’ve suddenly wanted to improve my English proficiency. I hope to be able to read English without barriers and speak fluent English. That’s also why I started translating the blogs of Paul Graham this year.

The trainer is from the Philippines and has worked and lived in the US for 22 years, so his English is very native. And perhaps because of his training - related work, he pays extra attention to pronunciation, word - choice, and speaking speed. So during the whole training process, I could communicate with him without relying on subtitles (our company uses Microsoft Teams as a communication software, which has a real - time subtitle function). But usually, when communicating with American colleagues, I can’t do without subtitles. Otherwise, I’ll miss a lot of information.

As I write this, I suddenly remember that last year I heard that many of our company’s colleagues in the Philippines graduated from very good local schools, equivalent to Tsinghua and Peking University in China.
I used to be skeptical about this statement. I thought our company was okay, but it shouldn’t be that attractive. But now I’m starting to believe it. Four of the colleagues I’ve had contact with are from the Philippines. They are all excellent, with strong learning abilities, very responsible, and their English is much better than mine.
If this news is true, it can be seen that good job opportunities in the IT industry are relatively scarce in the Philippines.

This training was online. Everyone joined remotely through their computers, and it was a small - scale one, with only 11 trainees. Plus an HR staff and the trainer, there were a total of 13 people.
At the beginning of the training yesterday, the trainer wanted everyone to turn on their cameras. He said “I want to looking your face” three times, but only I and another colleague turned on our cameras. I guess the trainer didn’t expect this.
It seems that the colleagues in Nanjing are the “shiest” among all the colleagues in our company. Because in some large meetings, we rarely see Nanjing colleagues turn on their cameras, while colleagues from the US, Canada, and even Japan often do.

One of the trainees in the training left a deep impression on me, but not a good one.
The trainer would call on some people to answer questions. Every time he was called on, this person either didn’t speak or spoke halfway and then suddenly stopped without explaining why. I think this is a basic courtesy issue.
In this kind of open - ended training, there is no right or wrong answer to the questions. The trainer also said “there is no wrong answer, just give it a try”. But no matter what the trainer said, he just wouldn’t speak.
The trainer may be used to this kind of situation because of his job, so he was quite calm. If I were in his shoes, I might be very angry.

During today’s training, the trainer played a 29 - minute negative case, which was an actual situation that happened in our company.
It should be that a customer of our company (from abroad, but I don’t know which country) couldn’t figure out a certain product configuration and contacted the support team (or after - sales service team) at 11 p.m. in the Beijing time zone.
After watching the video, one trainee described the conversation process as “totally disaster”, and I felt the same way, but I didn’t have the nerve to say it so bluntly.

During the whole conversation, no one on our company’s side had the ability or tried to control the conversation process. There were several times when the customer didn’t speak, and there was an awkward silence.
After the customer expressed their problems and needs, no one tried to repeat the problems to confirm that both sides had the same understanding.
None of the engineers involved in the conversation could solve the problem. They neither tried to contact others nor comforted the customer. They just kept saying “we can hold another meeting tomorrow” without explaining why they wanted to hold a meeting tomorrow. It gave the impression that they just wanted to get rid of the meeting and didn’t really want to solve the problem, making the user feel that they didn’t care about the user at all.

Regarding the training content itself, to be honest, I didn’t learn what I wanted the most.
What I actually wanted to know was how to accurately express my thoughts and ensure that the other party could understand my expression, especially in the English - speaking culture.
But the training content mainly focused on communication skills, such as what measures to take in different scenarios.

Finally, I attach a screenshot mentioned in the training about how to deal with “angry customers”.

Regarding “Apologize” in the picture, the trainer explained that you should only apologize to the other party when you think you (the company) are wrong. Don’t apologize without principles. Apologizing right away will only make others think they can disrespect you.
I quite agree with this point.