How to develop relationships digitally

Humans are social by nature; most of us pre­fer to inter­act in per­son. Apply a fil­ter, whether it’s a video call, email or text chat, and we have to find a whole new range of tools to make sure what we mean is what is under­stood. 

This is a par­tic­u­lar mine­field for those in pro­fes­sions that lean heav­i­ly on inter­per­son­al skills. The areas of sales, busi­ness devel­op­ment, teach­ing, jour­nal­ism and more all depend on learn­ing how to be what some might call a “peo­ple per­son”. 

With a huge shift to online inter­ac­tions, the chal­lenge is twofold: how do we train and then repli­cate inter­per­son­al skills in an almost total­ly dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment? 

Digital is not a barrier to learning

“I don’t see the dif­fer­ence between hav­ing a cup of cof­fee with some­one ver­sus hav­ing a Zoom. If I start putting up mind­set bar­ri­ers then psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly that has a big impact. You have to nor­malise this,” says Heather White, chief exec­u­tive of Smarter Net­work­ing. 

White reels off the tips and tricks for adapt­ing the in-per­son approach to a dig­i­tal ver­sion. One notable aspect is time; online the rule of thumb appears to be that the time need­ed for a con­ver­sa­tion is halved. But oth­er rules remain large­ly the same. As you might con­nect with some­one over your sur­round­ings in a café or office, so you do the same across a video call, pick­ing out inter­est­ing items in their back­ground or even bring­ing a prop, such as the lat­est book you’re read­ing, to cre­ate an inter­est­ing segue in the con­ver­sa­tion. 

“If you trans­late these skills online, it’s near enough the same stuff. The only dif­fer­ence is that you’re on con­fer­ence calls and you can see them look­ing at dif­fer­ent screens. The for­mat is slight­ly dif­fer­ent. That’s all it is,” says White. 

Piers French, direc­tor of clients, sup­port­ed liv­ing, at AO.com, agrees: “There isn’t a secret sauce for a Zoom meet­ing. It’s con­nect­ing with a per­son who sin­cere­ly wants to do some good for them.” 

Devel­op­ing authen­tic con­nec­tions with peo­ple seems to be key to suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ships in dig­i­tal envi­ron­ments and per­haps the last 12 months has been a fast track to get­ting to the point. “We’ve learnt more this year from clients than any pos­si­ble sell­ing tech­niques. You’re hav­ing more in-depth, valu­able con­ver­sa­tions.” French adds.

Adapting to the digital medium

That’s not to say raw authen­tic­i­ty doesn’t need a pol­ish. With­out some of the delay­ing tac­tics com­mon to in-per­son con­nec­tions – it’s not called an ele­va­tor pitch for noth­ing, it may be quick but the audi­ence is cap­tive – it’s hard work devel­op­ing a cold con­nec­tion dig­i­tal­ly.

“We took on three recruits who had nev­er done out­bound sell­ing in our indus­try before and taught them about how to secure time with a busy exec­u­tive. That meant research­ing the right peo­ple in a busi­ness and cre­at­ing a warm­ing email that shows them as wor­thy of that person’s time,” says French. 

Mag­gie Jones, direc­tor of qual­i­fi­ca­tions and part­ner­ships at the Char­tered Insti­tute of Mar­ket­ing (CIM), agrees inter­per­son­al skills via the writ­ten word has boomed in lock­down: “One of the most impor­tant soft skills to learn now is actu­al­ly writ­ing because that’s how peo­ple are inter­act­ing with their cus­tomers. Our copy­writ­ing cours­es are now one of our most pop­u­lar because you have to get the mes­sage across as suc­cinct­ly as pos­si­ble. If you don’t get that ini­tial email right…”

But, by and large, the online envi­ron­ment has pre­sent­ed as many oppor­tu­ni­ties as it has chal­lenges. The abil­i­ty for more junior staff to get involved, receive real-time feed­back and take a leap of faith.  

Embrace shadowing for deeper learning

Kate Hamil­ton, glob­al cus­tomer expe­ri­ence man­ag­er at pet­care com­pa­ny Lint­bells, explains how cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives are able to explore resources and receive sup­port, wher­ev­er they are. “We’re adapt­ing as best we can remote­ly. A lot of it is about lis­ten­ing to calls in real time and we make sure we can still do that. We also have a bud­dy scheme so if they feel they ben­e­fit from ‘sit­ting’ with oth­er peo­ple. Final­ly, we invest­ed in a new cus­tomer ser­vice sys­tem that will let us cre­ate a bank of best-in-class calls and this lets us work on spe­cif­ic soft skills.”

Being able to “lurk” dig­i­tal­ly by both man­agers and junior staff has been seen as a huge ben­e­fit. Aaron Shields, exec­u­tive direc­tor of expe­ri­ence strat­e­gy, Europe, Mid­dle East and Africa, at Lan­dor & Fitch, notes the pre­vi­ous­ly some­what per­for­ma­tive and often high­ly orches­trat­ed process of client pitch­ing in the mar­ket­ing agency sec­tor has been opened up to more junior staff, allow­ing them to learn at poten­tial­ly an accel­er­at­ed pace. 

“The great thing about lock­down in terms of less expe­ri­enced staff is you used to have to wor­ry about ‘cast­ing’ who was in the room. That’s gone away. The junior folk are present a lot more than they used to be in client-fac­ing meet­ings. They’re get­ting to see the client’s eyes light up and have more expo­sure,” he says. 

Support for emotional fallout

Sup­port has per­haps been the hard­est part of man­ag­ing inter­per­son­al and soft-skills learn­ing remote­ly. “We for­get with skills and rela­tion­ship build­ing that it can be dif­fi­cult to do that behind the screen. We make sure they have sup­port and know who they can go to,” says Hamil­ton, not­ing it’s a sad fact of their busi­ness that cus­tomers can­cel sub­scrip­tions due to the death of a pet. “When you’re sit­ting on your own it’s hard,” she acknowl­edges.

Kate Gard­house, CIM direc­tor of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, IT and oper­a­tions, says dig­i­tal learn­ing still has a way to go to repli­cate vital office inter­ac­tions that are more than just water­cool­er chat. She says: “What peo­ple miss is learn­ing by osmo­sis, over­hear­ing a col­league deal­ing with a sit­u­a­tion and learn­ing from that. I have so much admi­ra­tion for the peo­ple who have joined our busi­ness in the last year because this is so much hard­er to do from the spare room. If you’re in the office and have a bad call, your col­leagues are there to bring you up.”