You Don’t Want Your Employees to Say the Wrong Things

  • You Don’t Want Your Employees to Say the Wrong Things

Imagine this: there is a sudden call from another country. It is a potential partner who is inviting you to some future collaboration? You don’t want to see (and hear) your staff mumbling and struggling for words, then passing the phone in a panic from colleague to colleague, right?

Great opportunity missed!

But how are some companies doing it so successfully?

Telephoning skills (well, in English of course).

The ability to say the right words at the right time to your customers, clients, or partners is a precious skill. Moreover, if your staff can get the right message across while even incorporating particular cultural awareness into their communication, then you are a very lucky boss indeed. If they can do it in English, then you have reached some truly special — Excellent Telephoning!

How can your employees turn from being extremely shy and confused to confident communicators? Depending on their needs, we can begin to isolate what we think are some important phoning competencies.

Let’s get to basics first.

  • Learning how to receive (or start) a call and identifying This is probably the most important part: if people judge you by your first look, it works the same way through phone calling.
  • During the call, your staff might stumble on communication barriers. When they can’t catch up what the other person is saying, how will they ask the person to repeat? How to greet? Using first names? What is the polite way to make excuses or give bad news? This part is equally important; commonly called getting through.

Secondly, handling problems.

  • Your staff might have learned how to show empathy to customers. But when they know the strategies on how to deal with complaints, it is much faster for them to solve issues. Learning about telephone customer care and technical support hotline can assist employees hone in their abilities to resolve customer problems and even apologize in a manner that won’t make your customers leave you.

Thirdly, and perhaps the determining factor to a successful call, is the ending. How to reach the expected target?

  • Communicating by phone can be said to be more challenging than face-to-face communication. The nonverbal cues (that play an important role in communication) are erased completely. Therefore, it requires skill to become adept in speaking, presenting, and negotiating by phone.
  • Some courses offer detailed and thorough sessions on how we can approach different clients, offer them proposals, and reach an agreement. This process involves the understanding of turn-taking (knowing when to talk and stop to listen attentively). This is a necessary skill for the smooth flow of a phone conversation.

Before you decide which course best suits your employees (and which in-house training to trust), here is a tip they can already try starting from today (you can try it yourself too):

Don’t forget to smile – yes, they can ‘see’ it from the voice tone. There is a saying, smiling is contagious, and it applies just as well over the phone.

 

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