How to improve communication skills in the digital age?

Practicing communication skills effectively requires many factors and the communicator must know how to grasp the psychological behavior of the other person quickly. But many people do not really understand the importance of this skill leading to many mistakes in communicating with others. Thus, in this article, BEMO will help you better understand the essence of communication skills as well as offer ways to enhance this skill.

1. What are communication skills?

In a simple way, communication skills are the capability to use body language or words to convey certain messages or intentions to one or more objects. It is a state of interaction between speaker and listener with a specific purpose.

In the digital era, this is a vital skill to create trust, sympathy, or convey ideas easily to listeners. This skill requires a combination of factors:

• Listening
• Body language
• Tone
• Thoughts
• Expressions

Because successful communication must be persuasive and reasonable to please the listener, and not resist.

2. Why are communication skills important?

It is true that communication has played an essential role throughout the centuries, and in the digital age, people have more technology to expand their communication. Therefore, this skill needs to be paid more attention to customize speech that is appropriate for each culture, language and lead to effective results.

In business, a leader will not be appreciated if he/she cannot express to subordinates and vice versa. This even affects their ability to sell as they cannot convince customers. Therefore, you should understand the importance of communication:

• Basic Needs

Yes! Communication is inherent in all living creatures from birth to death. Typically babies, when they were born, they communicated by crying and laughing to express their feelings and needs with their parents.

• Social conditions

A society is formed from many individuals with different personalities, appearances, and thoughts. Hence, communication skills help human society to connect, exchange, and understand each other better when working, studying, and building ideas.

Without this skill, people will easily conflict with each other, and find it challenging to make joint decisions to develop society.

• Building relationships

The higher level of communication is relationship building. Thanks to communication skills, people can learn their interests, interact with many people around the world to expand their relationships, advance their careers, and improve their lives standard.

When there is a lack of communication, people will become isolated and unable to release their emotions leading to many unpredictable consequences.

• Personal development

Thanks to communication, each person will have more opportunities to learn about culture, social norms from the East to the West, and distinguish right from wrong. In addition, each individual can make judgments about others through words, gestures, and personalities to adjust their own behavior accordingly.

• Family cohesion

Considering the family factor, members will understand each other better and share opinions to increase cohesion and mutual support. Moreover, digital technology enables members who are far away to communicate by using smart devices to interact and enhance family values.

• Easy to succeed

In addition to expertise and enthusiasm at work, successful people also have outstanding communication skills. They are very smart when talking with partners, colleagues, and other social relationships.

As a result, they can go further in their career and achieve more success. Or this skill also supports you to work better as a team because you can easily cooperate, understand everyone’s ideas, and develop together.

3. Practice communication skills in the digital era

Communication skills are vital for every individual, but how can this ability be enhanced? BEMO would like to offer you some suggestions below to help practice communication skills:

• Be good at listening

Success in communication is about listening because when you listen, you will understand deeply, empathize with the speaker, and analyze carefully to give the right words. Thus, to achieve success in communication, you should patiently listen to the speaker and analyze carefully before answering.

• Observation

In communication, you should carefully observe the mood of the person you are communicating with to adjust gestures and behavior to suit the context.

For example, when communicating with an angry person you cannot show mockery, or express sadness when sharing with a happy person.

With observation skills, you can also succeed in sales since it is easy to grasp their emotions and behaviors to consult accordingly.

• Social interaction:

In social communication, you must know how to behave when meeting a new acquaintance, or colleague, superior. Hence, you can start the conversation with a friendly greeting or in a polite way to make a good impression.

Particularly for friends, you can behave by greeting jokingly, cordially, and not too formally. But don’t forget to say goodbye at the end of the conversation because whether the relationship continues or ends depends greatly on this. You can say “goodbye, see you soon” to maintain the relationship.

• Persuasion skills:

Your communication skills will fail if you cannot convince your audience, and they certainly won’t believe you. Therefore, when communicating, you must provide evidence and reasons neatly while your posture must be towards the listener so that they perceive you as a trustworthy person.

Besides, you should also combine the above observation skills to capture their nuances or analyze the personality of the object before communicating.

• Teamwork:

A good communicator knows how to get along with his colleagues to complete tasks smoothly. Therefore, you need to skillfully reconcile everything, listen to the other party, and show respect. Thus, the overall work efficiency will have the best value. This is also an important skill that all businesses today require employees to meet to improve performance.

• Handling situations:

Certainly people with good communication skills are confident in how to handle social and work situations. And to achieve that level you must be able to listen, share, empathize, and have a keen observation to come up with the right solution.

• Confidence:

You will be judged for poor communication skills if your words lack confidence and it will be challenging to build trust with others. Therefore, each of your words must be clear and coherent so that the other person can see that you are competent enough for them to believe, or they will be impressed by your confident way of speaking.

Based on the above factors, you can see that communication skills are multifaceted and require you to be sensitive in varied situations. At the same time, to be able to achieve outstanding communication skills, you have to patiently practice over time.

If you are a sales person, you should also learn the skill of Cross-selling by always following BEMO for more updates!