The menu for the 175-person banquet that Arlene Sheff was planning concluded with a trio of small chocolate desserts. Wanting to make sure that there was something to please even those who were not chocoholics like herself, Sheff, CMP, senior meeting and event planner for The Boeing Co. in Seal Beach, Calif., wanted to change one or two of those desserts to something else. Through several confirmations, she was certain that her wishes were well communicated, but at the event, as plates sailed out of the kitchen, each one held three little chocolate sweets.

“I explained to the banquet captain, ‘This isn't what I ordered. These are all chocolate, and I wanted one or two that aren't chocolate,” Sheff recalls. “He said, ‘I have your two desserts that are not chocolate in the back.'”

Sheff was sure she had made herself clear about those desserts during a number of conversations with her convention services manager. “We talked about it 10 different times,” she says, “but in our minds, we were not talking about the same thing.”

Why Won't You Return My Call?

Some planners might consider Sheff lucky — at least she had some communication going. One planner contacted for this story is still waiting for a response to a question she posed three weeks ago to the salesperson working on her upcoming 300-person event.

“Communication has just become too lackadaisical,” says the planner, who wished to remain nameless. “We are the buyers. They are the sellers. How badly do they need the business?”

Not badly at all, as planners are finding out. In the current seller's market, it seems that some hotels can pick and choose what business they want — so they're just not calling back.

Erika Powell, CMP, team lead meeting planner for Global Knowledge, Cary, N.C., organizes up to 25 IT training events across the country every week, and she often finds herself scrambling for overflow space just two weeks out — and never getting a fast answer. After calling five or six properties without reaching a single live person, return messages trickle in slowly over a few days.

“I can't understand why the message is not [conveyed] to the salesperson that the need is urgent. Surely, if it were, the response time would be quicker,” Powell says, adding that she suspects that the slow response is due, in part, to the fact that “they know that their space will get sold one way or the other.”

Response time is so critical to Linda Vest, CMP, event planner for State Farm Insurance in Dallas, that she will not use a property that doesn't respond in a timely fashion.

“As a team of planners, we discuss how we get serviced at a facility. We have a database, and if [communication] is a negative, it's recorded that we shouldn't contact them because they don't call back. And that has happened,” she says.

Of course, many sales teams work hard to make sure that that is never the case. At the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, Kimberly A. Hoppe, executive director of meetings and special events, says she has shrunk turnaround times for a reply from four hours to just two, and has given most of her managers BlackBerries. “My staff is receiving e-mails at three, four, five o'clock in the morning,” she says. “Turnaround time expectation is greater than it used to be, so the more tools I can give them, the better.”

Multitasking At Midnight

But even if salespeople are returning e-mails promptly while they are deluged with a million other tasks, are their clients' requests really getting through?

“People are so busy multitasking that they hear, but do not listen,” says Andrea Nierenberg, speaker, author, and trainer, The Nierenberg Group, New York. “In the course of a half hour, you can e-mail 30 people but really not communicate with anyone.”

Also, the more people rush, the sloppier and less professional those messages can become. “If I were dealing with someone on the supplier side whose grammar and spelling were sloppy, my impression would be that they are not professional, and I would question working with them,” says Bonnie Wallsh, CMP, CMM, chief strategist, Bonnie Wallsh Associates LLC, who teaches meeting planning classes at Virginia Tech and the Rosen College of Hospitality at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Fla., as well as being an independent planner. “It may not be true — they may be crackerjack at the job — but that's how I judge people.”

Ritz-Carlton's Hoppe says that ensuring quality e-mail correspondence is an ongoing challenge for her. “When you're on e-mail as your No. 1 mode of communication, you have to be sure as a company that everyone gets trained, because not everyone is great at writing letters,” she says. “E-mails, if they're not phrased properly, can be very damaging.”

Hoppe exposes all her managers to e-mail etiquette training courses, often bringing in outside communication-skill trainers, and encourages her staff to bounce messages off one another before sending them to clients to make sure that the tone and clarity are what they intend.