When you insist (or don’t know any better than to) use your own in-house jargon with a customer and in proposal documentation, you demonstrate clearly to the customer your inward, internal, self-focused thinking.
You give him or her the clear message that you are either unable or unwilling to think or communicate from any perspective other than your own/your company’s. And you indicate to them that they’ll have to constantly make the effort to interpret you and your position, rather than vice versa, as it should in fact be.
Examples abound when dealing with B2C (business to consumer) organisations, especially the very large institutions.
An instance from just yesterday springs readily to mind:
When my car experienced a flat battery, I called my home state’s automobile association for urgent road service.
The young call centre operator made reference to something like “standard service” and something like “ultra”. I indicated that I needed her to explain the key differences between those two options.
She seemed extremely surprised at my request, and went on to do little more than repeat the same internal jargon – somehow expecting that to make things clearer at my end.
After three attempts at getting her to understand that she was using “company speak” that wasn’t meaningful to me, she responded – still unhelpfully – by stating that I would have read about the different options when I took out my membership.
So, here I am, schedule on ice with a flat battery at rush hour, and somehow I am meant to recall the specific features of two levels of service I made a decision between several years ago.
The point is, when someone displays an inability to speak in anything other than his or her employer’s internal jargon (and expects the listener to know exactly what he or she means by any given term) it flags a certain lack of communication maturity – and, arguably, a certain lack of intelligence.
The same impression is conveyed to evaluators when an organisation’s bid writers demonstrate this type of weakness. It also plants concerns as to the degree of frustration that might be experienced in communicating with the bidder’s delivery team or other client/customer-facing personnel, along with the associated scope for error – particularly if the service or product in question is of a highly technical nature, and non-technical staff will be involved in communications with the vendor or service provider.
