Effective communication is not about what you want to say - it is all about listening.

Effective communication - like all aspects of marketing - should take into account the needs, wants, desires and mindset of the person who is going to hear or see the message - not just what the messenger wants to be heard or seen.

You may want your customers to know that over 90% of your trains run on time.

Your customers, on the other hand, want to know why they couldn’t catch a train home after a day at the races.

The big news in Melbourne last Friday morning was that tens of thousands of race goers had been stranded for two hours the night before at Flemington station, in trains stopped between stations and upon inner city platforms.

They were jumping out of rail carriages, walking the tracks, knocking on car windows and begging strangers for a lift home – but most of all they were asking ‘what’s going on?’.

By the next morning the people phoning talk back radio, writing to the editors, shaking their heads; sharing the story at supermarket checkouts, around water coolers and across cafe tables weren’t complaining about the network breaking down. They understood that things break.

What they didn’t understand was why no one told them what was happening; that despite having railway staff on every train (with public address systems in lots of carriages) and at the stations, that no one from the railway told the stranded passengers what was going on.

Some 16 hours later the rail company held a media conference to unreservedly apologise – for the system breaking down.

Is that what the customers wanted to hear? It certainly wasn’t for the people calling talk-back. They took the failure of the railway to communicate during the crisis to be a far bigger problem than a mechanical issue with the network. The railway may have thought that they should fix the network, to rush their passengers home and talk later, but not letting the passengers know what was going on (Was it a bomb? Has there been a crash? Should we stay on board or walk the tracks? Is that safe?) demonstrated a total lack of empathy.

And though their customers told them where they had got it wrong via their blogs, talk back calls, letters to the editor, complaints to the switchboard...Even then, they didn't listen. They just kept apologising for the me.chanical problem - with the disclaimer that it was a 20 million to one problem

Actively demonstrating to your customers that you just aren't listening to them really doesn't enhance your brand.

The communication issue went from bad to worse by Saturday morning when the railway took out full page ads in the Herald Sun and The Age to unreservedly apologise for the breakdown (lots of details about the technical fault – not one reference to not having kept the passengers informed) and stated that they were donating $100,000 to a charity to make up for it all...

But between signing off on the ad on Friday afternoon, and publication of the ‘papers very early Saturday morning, they had changed their mind about whether a charitable donation was the right tactic – so withdrew the offer (but not the ads) and announced in the editorial space that race goers that day would receive free travel home, but sorry, no charitable donation.

Confused? You should be.

In this case the lack of communication during the crisis sent a very clear message.  And when they did start to talk, they said one thing - and then did another.   They focused upon the signals on the track - but didn't stop to think about the signals they were sending, not just to the tens of thousands of passengers effected on the day - but the broader community of potential passengers.

In a true customer focused culture the first instinct is to tell your customers what is going on – even when it is bad news.

When your factory screams to a halt, when the truck breaks down, when your software goes bang and you can’t get the project finished on time, is your tendency to get all hands on deck to fix the internal problem, to get things moving again, and then to talk to your customers?

Or is it to put yourself in the mind – and maybe the tired feet – of your customer and recognise that though they may forgive you for failing to deliver, that they are unlikely to thank you for being kept in the dark?

What do you think?