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CMA Foundation · Fundamentals of Business Economics and Management · Communication, Co-ordination, Collaboration, Monitoring and Control

A sales executive at Bharat Foods tells a customer over a call, 'I will send the quotation soon.' The customer understands 'soon' as the same day, but the executive meant within a week. In communication terms, the failure arises mainly at the stage of:

The failure arises at encoding and decoding. The sender put a vague word, soon, to stand for a week, while the receiver decoded it as the same day. The medium worked properly and no transmission fault or missing feedback is described, so the misunderstanding is semantic.

  1. AEncoding and decoding, due to differing interpretation of wordsCorrect
  2. BChoice of medium, because telephone is oral
  3. CFeedback, because the customer did not reply
  4. DTransmission, due to a network fault

Explanation

The sender encoded an intended meaning into the word 'soon', but the receiver decoded it differently. The problem lies in meaning attached to words, not the channel or a technical fault. No fault in transmission or missing feedback is stated.

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