Fundamentals of Effective Communication in the Workplace

Binish Chaudry
Professor Martin Jackson
Business 100
November 2, 2014

I work as an accounts receivable manager at CHS Builder System. The Account Receivable (AR) system is set up so that the accounts receivable team sends out e-mail reminders every week to each customers. The emails are friendly reminders about their outstanding balance on their account. Some customers did not like receiving the reminders. They felt that they were being harassed. The customers requested to the General Managers (GM) of my company to have the accounts receivable team to not send the reminder e-mails anymore. The GM’s did not communicate this with the accounts receivable team and in result, the accounts receivable team continued to send the reminder e-mails. Due to these on-going e-mails, a handful of customers threatened to drop the services. Being the accounts receivable manager, the issue was brought to my attention and I was required to resolve the issue as soon as possible. After discussing the issue with the GM’s and the AR team separately via phone calls and e-mails, I came to the conclusion that there was a miscommunication between the two.
To resolve the miscommunications between the GM’s and AR team that was causing the issue with customers, I had to come up with a plan to resolve the issue. First, I requested from the GM’s to create an excel report based on the accounting system and mark the customers that they did not want the AR team to contact. After that, I made the request to the AR team start documenting the AR reminder e-mails, (i.e., number of times sent out, replies from customers and complaints). After reviewing the gathered info from both groups, it’s proved that the GM’s and AR team were not communicating effectively. I recommended to the GM’s that a No AR Reminder List be created and that the AR team adhere to the list and not contact the customers on it.
To make my recommendation effective, I scheduled a conference call with the GM’s and AR team to explain the problem and to resolve the issue based on the information I collected and the plan I wanted to implement to resolve the issue in a positive manner. During the conference call, we discussed the customer’s complaints and that the AR team was still contacting them because the general managers never communicated this information to AR team. After the issue was brought to the table, I presented my collected information from the both groups. I purposed that the No AR Reminder List be created and followed by the AR team. The GM’s will be responsible creating the list, keeping it up to date and dispersing to the AR team. The AR team will be responsible for adhering to the list and also notify the GM’s of customer complaints, non-payments and issues. It was during this discussion that the AR team brought up a number of issues with customer, I then recommended that an AR Issues List be created by the AR team to document customer issues and submitted to the GM’s on a weekly basis. Both groups agreed to the plan. With this plan in effect now for more