Telephone and voice skills
Good telephone technique is important to all businesses, but in particular it is key in sales and customer service areas, such as conference calls, business development calls and claims & complaint-handling.
Our approach
Our approach ensures that professionals come away from our courses better able to:
- Make and receive calls
- Handle objections, resistance and doubts
- Sell effectively
- Manage their time for maximum efficiency; and
- Be versatile in behaviour to handle a variety of different types of people.
Background
Why is it so important?
There are two main reasons:
Firstly, it is the primary contact method with customers, clients, suppliers and prospects: some 70% of all contact with these groups is
via the telephone.
It is by far the easiest and cheapest way to discuss matters person-to-person. The importance of a good telephone manner by those who answer calls on behalf of an organisation should never be underestimated.
Secondly, it is cost-effective. This effectiveness comes down to three factors: interpersonal spoken communications, speed and the low cost compared with the alternatives.
Speed and cost benefits are obvious, but the interpersonal factor means we can still be engaged in a dialogue (a reduced form of two way face-to-face conversation). The key issues can be agreed and decided upon whilst differentiating yourselves from your competitors.
Areas of advice
With this reduced communication, it is important to realise what we can tell about the person on the other end of the call versus what we can partially tell or not at all. We often guess wrongly about things like age, mood and appearance.
We coach those people in an organisation whose key role it is to answer and make calls. We help outgoing callers with telephone manner, tone of voice, presenting their ideas in a persuasive way, and handling of questions. For those primarily dealing with incoming calls, we cover similar topics, but in addition cover the handling of customer complaints and giving out information.
Voice skills
The sound of your voice on a phone call is the only way in which your content can be conveyed in that medium; calls lack the visual information of a video call or face-to-face meeting. So the voice has to be really good!
Our Voice Coaching is not just for phone calls, it is actually very helpful in all spoken communication arenas, especially for those who have speaking as a core part of their role, such as business developers, complaint and customer service centres.
We typically use our Scientific Voice Analysis to establish a baseline and to provide objective and measured input to the areas we should focus on. We will coach all vocal areas that would benefit significantly from development, with the main ones being Pitch Modulation and Disfluency. We can help to deepen Pitch Height, optimise Volume (Loudness), improve articulation, regain control of pace, and introduce pauses – the silent part of good spoken communication.
