How to Succeed at Communication: Using Conversational Scripts to Your Advantage

I was on-site with a client a few weeks ago, speaking with one of their employees in the sales department, and I was trying to find the common thread in the problems she was having speaking with customers, problems that had started to snowball into larger problems for other departments.  

As I listened to her speak, I realized that the common thread was that the interactions she had problems with were unusual. They were interactions that only had to happen once in a while, because they centered around big mistakes or problems that she would have to tell the customer about. These didn’t happen frequently, but one version of them or another happened every few months, and when they did happen, she didn’t handle them well. Difficult conversations that weren’t as rare didn’t give her nearly the same trouble.

It turns out that the reason the unusual conversations were a problem is that she didn’t have a conversational script for them, and she ended up with crippling anxiety about being able to competently hold the conversation.

Conversational Scripts

Scripts are one of the types of perceptual schema that we use to make sense of the world around us. Scripts aren’t the only schema we use, but they might be the one we use most frequently. Like the rest of the perceptual schema, scripts are a way of reducing the amount of cognitive energy (i.e., brainpower) it takes to exist in a social world.

A script is, essentially, the lines we read in pre-written interactions. Think of the last time you were in the check-out line at a grocery store. What did you say to the cashier? What did they say to you? I’m going to guess that the interaction went something like this:

“Did you find everything you were looking for today?”

“Yup.”

Beep…..beep…beep

“Would you like me to scan a rewards card?”

“No thanks.”

Beep….beep….beep

The bagger pipes in with “Paper or plastic?”

“Paper, please.”

“Your total is $74.89” 

“Thank you, have a nice day.”

“Thanks, you too.”

That’s a very scripted interaction, and it’s one that we’ve all had – and we all know by heart. It’s great for everyone involved, because it requires precisely zero brainpower on the part of anyone involved to get through competently. We all know what our lines are, and as long as we read our lines well, it’s a trivially easy interaction to succeed at while paying attention to the dozen other things we’re thinking about.

Or how about the last time you passed by an acquaintance on the sidewalk? Not an actual friend – we’re likely to really talk to them – but an acquaintance, a “hi” friend, I like to call them. As in, you see them regularly, but never say anything more than “hi” to them. What was that conversation like?

“Hi, how are you?”

“Great, you?”

“Good, thanks.”

(You both keep walking)

The point of that conversation isn’t to honestly answer the question “how are you?” Rather, the point is to read our lines of the script. In fact, we so obviously don’t want an actual honest answer to “how are you” that Budweiser did an amazing commercial  in the ‘00s about a guy who honestly answered that question.

A really, really large percentage of the interactions we have with people with whom we aren’t close are scripted. Don’t believe me? Next time you’re in an interaction you suspect is scripted, don’t read your lines competently. Do something different. Skip a response, answer with way too much information, heck, respond with an unusual accent. Just do something unexpected and see what happens.

About 15 years ago, when I was teaching at James Madison University [link to SCOM site], I went to Staples to pick up something for my office. I was standing in a line of about 5 people, and I realized that the high school-aged cashier had completely checked out (pun totally intended). It was clear she was not mentally present in the interactions with the people in line ahead of me.

I decided it was time for a spontaneous experiment.

When it was my turn at the register, I decided to not respond to her first question, to pretend to be fumbling in my wallet for something, and not say anything. The conversation went something like this:

“Hi, thanks for choosing Staples, did you find everything you were looking for today?”

“……”

“Great, will this be cash or credit?”

She blew right past my non-response! The interaction was so scripted that she just kept reading her lines even when I didn’t read mine.

When scripts get violated, people who have completely cognitively disengaged can blow right past the violation. And can you blame them? I would do the exact same thing if I needed to have the same superficial conversation 200 times every day. 

But for most people, when the script gets violated, it forces us to cognitively re-engage, to suddenly think about our part in the interaction in a way we hadn’t planned on doing. In fact, there are some businesses that use this to their advantage. A prime example of this is Outback Steakhouse.

“That’s not a steak…THAT’s a steak!”

Breaking the Script to Gain an Advantage, or Why Everyone Buys the Chocolate Thunder from Down Under

If you’ve never been to an Outback Steakhouse, it’s an interesting place to eat. It’s over-the-top, weapons-grade Australian. Their bathrooms are labelled “Blokes” and “Sheilas.” They actually sell Shrimp on the Barbie. But that’s not why it’s interesting for our purposes here. That’s just what happens when a guy in Tampa watches “Crocodile Dundee” too many times and decides to start a restaurant chain. No, Outback Steakhouse is interesting for another reason.

If you’ve ever been to one, you may have noticed that the waitstaff will sit at your table/booth with you (if there’s an open seat), or they will kneel down next to you (if there’s not). That’s a little thing that makes a huge difference: It throws the customers out of their “restaurant” script. They do this on purpose because it has a real advantage for them.

Suddenly, the customers are forced to interact with their waiter/waitress (I refuse to use the term “server” – I think it’s incredibly demeaning) as if they are an actual person, not just a faceless robot that delivers food. They can’t just rely on autopilot for their interactions with the waitstaff. They have to re-engage their brain.

This has serious implications for the restaurant and the waitstaff themselves. When they try to upsell you on the high-margin dessert, it’s not the waitress asking if you want it, it’s Stephanie asking, and she’s been fantastic all evening, just lovely company and really attentive, and she recommends it highly and thinks you’ll find it delicious. Of course you get that high-margin dessert. Then when the bill comes, it’s a lot harder to stiff Stephanie on the tip than it is most servers. Again, because you remember her as an individual, not just a faceless, nameless person bringing your food, and you’ll tip her really well.

Leveraging Conversational Scripts in your Business

 To return to the sales employee from the beginning of this post, what I gave back to her to start practicing was, in essence, a set of scripts for the difficult conversations with which she was having trouble. Because I was creating the script whole-cloth, I had the opportunity to follow some principles of effective communication. For example, here’s one of the statements I gave her, to be used when their production shop will be late getting a customer’s order finished, in which I use what Bill Benoit would call “good intentions” – or emphasizing that the act requiring the apology was done for the right reasons:

           “ I’m sorry sir, but we won’t have your piece ready by the agreed-upon date. Your order is being built using the highest quality wood from our small-batch, artisanal supplier in Vermont, and they have had distribution problems in recent months. We’re sure you’ll agree that compromising on the quality of our materials is just not an option, and we expect that your piece will be ready by next week”

By having this conversation pre-built and rehearsed, my hope is that she will be able to reduce the anxiety she experiences the next time she needs to have this interaction.

How Can You Use Scripts to Your Advantage?

So far, we’ve seen an example of how adding a script can make interactions with customers less problematic, and we’ve seen an example of how forcing people out of their scripts can make interactions with customers more profitable. Now it’s your turn: How can you put scripts to work for your business?

The Coronavirus/COVID-19 is forcing Organizations into Remote Work. This means the rules about how to be a competent communicator are about to change

Organizations are rightly concerned with the health and well-being of their workforce this week. It is, frankly, refreshing to hear of major organizations like Stanford University and Apple being willing to make dramatic changes by encouraging/requiring that their business be conducted remotely. Something that isn’t being discussed, however, is what happens to your organizational members’ communication skillset when they are forced into conducting every interaction through a remote work platform? You cannot simply assume that because your people are competent at communicating face-to-face, they will be equally as competent when you tell them that they have to work remotely for the next few weeks.

One answer can be found by better understanding Communication Competence and how it changes when the communication moves to a mediated context.

Brian Spitzberg and William Cupach, both important figures in human communication research, argued that Communication Competence was based in the ability to demonstrate four particular types of communicative skills:

Attentiveness - Concern for, interest in, and attention to the other person(s) in the interaction
Composure - Assertiveness, confidence, and being in control
Coordination - Managing timing, initiation and closure of conversation, and guidance of topics
Expressiveness - Displaying a vividness and animation in verbal and nonverbal expression

With all human communication, the medium for that communication is incredibly important to the functioning of the interaction. What if the medium suddenly changes, without warning, planning, or preparation? That is the situation many workers will be facing in the coming days, as their employers allow, encourage, or even mandate work-from-home. As the communication medium changes, so too do the demands of the interactions.

The effect of a organization-wide switch to mediated communication channels could be dramatic. Consider text-based interactions on a platform like Slack: Immediately, we can see that it’s going to be much more difficult to be Expressive - as purely text-based channels lack most/all of the nonverbal channels that exists when communicating face-to-face. Coordination of messages is more difficult because those platforms are varying degrees of asynchronous - controlling conversational flow and topic direction is more difficult there. Attentiveness and Composure become problematic because we usually express these things (at least partially) nonverbally, which goes out the window in a Slack channel.

How do you communicate competently in a mediated channel like Slack?

Promote Attentiveness by making sure you acknowledge the high-quality contributions of others in writing. Remember, a head nod and a thumbs-up won’t cut it anymore. For example, “Thanks, Linda, that was an excellent idea, and I want to make sure it doesn’t get buried here in the chat. I’d like to build on what Linda said by adding…” Yes, that sounds overly formal, but it’s necessary to make up for the shortcomings of the medium.

Promote Composure by making your writing more assertive. Lose the hedges, qualifiers, and tag questions that signal a lower power-position (“umm….”, “well….”, “I may be wrong, but…”, “….don’t you agree?”), and a reluctance to assert your position. Get your ideas out there: One of the great things about a medium like Slack is that everyone in a chat has equal access to it. You aren’t subject to the same conversational turn-taking dicta that you are in a face-to-face interaction.

Promote Coordination by giving ample signposts to your coworkers. Signposts are conversational transition points that give others in the interaction guidance on what’s coming up next, provide options for different directions the conversation could go, and give warning when the conversation is to end, or a new one needs to start. Example: “We are going to need to make a decision in five minutes whether we would like to revisit the proposal one more time, or whether we are going to send it up the ladder…”

Promote Expressiveness by using all of the tools available in the medium. Make the interaction as cue-rich as it possibly can be. Use emojis (née emoticons, which were created to reintroduce some form of nonverbal messaging back into a text-only medium), photos, gifs, links, and text styling (e.g., bolding) to highlight, emphasize, and direct the interaction.

Finally be an expert in the technology used to communicate. Any technological mediation puts a premium on knowledge - not all persons will be equally as skilled at manipulating the technology, and the ones who are more fluent in the technology are at an advantage. When using the technology is your only way to conduct business, you either master the technology or you can’t communicate competently.