Do You Practice Your Telephone Skills?
To improve your professional telephone communications, consider participating in Professional Telephone Skills Training Course offered by pdtraining in Auckland, Tauranga and other cities in New Zealand.
1. Alertness – Your telephone voice should have spark and energy. Give the customer the impression that you are wide-awake, alert and anxious to help.
2. Pleasantness – Your telephone voice should be smooth, not jarring or whiny. Communicate with your voice that you are a pleasant and happy person. There is no room for shortness or anger.
3. Conversational tone – You are a live human being talking with (not at) another live human being. Even when using a script or prompts, keep your tone conversational and your language simple and straightforward.
4. Distinctness – Use clear articulation and enunciation. We all tend to get lazy in our face-to-face speech. The telephone exaggerates this tendency, so open your mouth and let the sound come out clearly.
5. Expressiveness – Vary your tone and rate. Build a verbal picture with your voice.
Vocal Qualities Checklist
Tick the appropriate boxes in order to identify your strengths and areas for improvement:
| RATE | |
| Slow (listener starts to wander) | o |
| Good (listener stays on track) | o |
| Fast (listener finds it too difficult to keep up) | o |
| VOLUME | |
| Too soft | o |
| Just right | o |
| Too loud | o |
| CLARITY | |
| Over-enunciated, sounded mechanical | o |
| Enunciated well, each word was clear | o |
| Mumbled, slurred words or dropped endings | o |
| PITCH | |
| Too high, sounded whiny | o |
| Too low, sounded grave | o |
| Monotonous, no variation | o |
| Good, sounded natural and varied | o |
| TONE | |
| Friendly | o |
| Sincere | o |
| Overly enthusiastic | o |
| Pushy | o |
| Timid | o |
| Confident | o |
Pdtraining delivers 1000’s of professional development courses each year in Wellington, Auckland, Napier, Christchurch, Hamilton, Dunedin and Tauranga, so you can be assured your training will be delivered by a qualified and experienced trainer.
All public Professional Telephone Skills Training courses include am/pm tea, lunch, printed courseware and a certificate of completion. Customised courses are available upon request so please contact pdtraining on 1300 121 400 to learn more.