Unless you have been living the life of a hermit in a cave deep in the forest for the last few years, the amount of time you’ve spent in telephone calls would be more than five minutes a day, according to Wikianswers. Regardless of what your company does, people will call your office every day. When people deal with your organization over the telephone, what’s their experience? Is everyone managing every phone call successfully? Or do you have some people with the great knack of handling telephone calls well while the rest can’t even be trusted to answer a ringing telephone? There is a way to improve this picture. We have three rules of effective listening to help you get started now in creating a memorable positive experience for your callers.

Rule 1. Effective listening starts in your mind. An open one, that is.

The telephone is a touch point; a chance for other people to get to know your brand and what your organization is about. Granted, an incoming phone call could be a complaint, but it could also be a long-awaited special offer or a new customer who’s just heard about you. Seeing the ringing phone as the enemy that interrupts your work will stop you from listening actively to the caller’s tone and words that correctly reflect his mood. You will miss his sense of urgency or jump into the wrong conclusions. Have you ever done that? Remember, that call you pick up could be the fifth or fifteenth for you but may very well be the person’s first call of the day. How will you use that one chance for making the right first impression?

Rule 2. Listening involves more than hearing.

Peter Drucker once said, “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”
This means you need to really pay attention to how something is said. Let callers complete their questions and statements. Acknowledge verbally. Use recaps and probe gently to get all details. Listen to the tone of the caller’s voice to get a better idea of the mood he/she is in or if the caller’s in a rush. Keep a notepad with you to jot down key points. Check and clarify each point you noted. Even if it’s a simple task of asking the person to hold the line while you forward the call to your colleague, how you deal with the call influences the caller’s experience.

Rule 3. Listen to you, too.

How you respond to callers shapes their responses to you. Are you speaking too fast? Too loud? Too soft? Do you mumble? Does the tone of your voice sound pleasant to the ear? Is it too high? Too low? Just right? Do you sound alert or too bored to care? Your caller will hear it. Roll your shoulders back. Relax your facial muscles around your eyes and mouth before answering that phone call, and your caller will hear the smile in your voice and will feel assured that you are the right person to help her.

Next month, we’ll talk about the one ‘Do or die’ element that you need to have in place to help everyone in your organization manage all calls effectively. In the meantime, have you called your office lately? How would you rate that experience?

Faz has 14 years’ experience managing training and development projects. An avid mind-mapper for more than 15 years, she designs and develops programs and content and is a Consultant in McGirvanmedia (Asia) Sdn. Bhd.

Andy*: Hello?
Annie: Yes?
Andy: Is William there?
Annie? William? Not here. He’s in the bathroom.
Andy: Oh. Can I leave a -
Annie:
Andy: ??
* fictional characters

For many of us, the telephone is the first contact we have with an organization. As the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And that first impression can either leave customers calling elsewhere, or have them excited about learning more about your products or services.

Making the right long-lasting first impression goes beyond answering the telephone after one or two rings and greeting callers with your company name and the customary “How can I help you?” – it involves a focus on two areas: what you say and how you say them.

Planning what to say is not just relevant to call centers where agents with telephone headsets use prepared script or checklists in most of their interactions. It’s about identifying a standard way of answering the telephone, the best words to use and the best process to manage calls (transferring or forwarding calls) from people who are calling on their valuable time.

Focusing on how you say things is as important, if not more, than identifying what to say and what to do. A key part of this is using more than your ears to listen. At the core of it is paying attention. It also involves watching out for how the caller is speaking, the words they use, and the right approach in probing for more information. From this, you can identify the right tone, volume, and even the right comforting sounds that you may need to make, in order to make the call a good experience for the customer.

Effective telephone skills can help you make a first impression that can go a long way in connecting with customers. They’re essential in handling queries and other requests for information, even if it’s just a caller looking for a colleague who is not at his desk at the moment. And if the colleague in question really does happen to be in the bathroom, it’s best to inform the caller that “William is away from his desk right now. Would you like to leave a message?” It works much better!

When we think of human capital performance, coaching is one of the first things that come to mind. In the last decade, coaching has firmly taken its seat in the business world and has proven that it is here to stay. But what is “coaching for performance”? How do you do that? There is still a lot of confusion and misconception around it and people are wondering if coaching really is the Holy Grail of performance management.

Having explored performance management, it seems to be mainly a process driven system that is externally imposed on the employee i.e. outside-in. However, introducing coaching creates an inside out approach, for the power of coaching lies very much in the fact that it works exactly the opposite way. With coaching the employees themselves are the centre and starting point for performance management and they are asked to evaluate themselves. This particularly works well when you have a high-trust culture, helpful systems that are tools not goals in themselves (Stephen Covey, The 8th Habit).

For many organizations and managers it might feel as a paradox, but it seems that to get your employees to become more self-evaluating, self-developing and ultimately self-managing, you need to loosen the grip and start getting used to being in command but out of control (Malcolm Gladwell, Blink).

We have seen that a balanced approach is needed in performance management, between measurement and development, left and right brain approach. In coaching, great breakthroughs in reframing an employee’s perception and letting them move forward (i.e. develop) are made when balancing the left and right brain approach to things. The typical left brained person will look at things in a narrow and deep way, while the right brained person tends to take a wide and shallow view. The combination of left and right (not necessarily both at the same time, as it can be very powerful to switch sides multiple times) will give the person a wide and deep
view. Therefore a person who is extremely left brained in their view of a certain situation will benefit hugely by shifting their perception through looking at things from a right brain perspective (and visa versa).

So there is only one last thing to do and that is to answer the question… is coaching the Holy Grail of performance management? Based on my research, the answer is ‘No’, it is not. Although coaching has brought balance to performance management by shifting the focus towards performance development, we also need to be realistic and admit that the corporate world at this point in time is still dominated by the focus on either making money and/or saving money. Therefore businesses will ultimately remain aligned and organised to support that goal.

However, coaching has not just shifted the balance, it is very much shifting the balance towards performance development and focus on people. It might just be a matter of time before we reach the tipping point, that magical moment when the concept of coaching has reached a critical mass and tips the scales. How far we are removed from that moment is unsure, but perhaps later in hindsight we are able to say… ‘Yes’ coaching was indeed the Holy Grail, not just for performance management but for the entire corporate world.

Vincent is an Executive & Business Coach and a Whole Brain and HBDI Certified Practitioner, driven by passion for people improvement and effective implementation of creative end-to-end solutions for human capital development.

This article is a summary of Vincent’s research paper for the International Coaching Association. If you like to receive a copy of the full paper, please contact us.

You can have them, if you have:
• Employees who understand what is expected of them,
• A company that has organizational focus, AND
• Internal and external strategies that fit well.

How close are you to get what you want, right now?

People are at the core of any business. Whether your company operates in a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) or Business-to-Business (B2B) environment, you still need to serve people who are your customers. Meanwhile, inside your organization, you have people who need to understand the company purpose and strategy in a way that makes sense to them in order to be effective in their jobs.

Branding from the inside out is really about getting the employees of the organisation to be in sync with the marketing and branding message of the company. It’s about
creating strong relationships. When this is achieved, you have a powerful marketing formula that is not easy to copy.

You’re probably asking yourself now: What do I need to get there?

You will need people who are excited about your organization. Not just employees, but also suppliers and clients (of course) who are excited about your brand. When
they’re excited about your products and services, they’d choose you, always. You’ll need a committed team to drive change, as branding from the inside out is about a journey; a transition that takes time, and it’s long-term. All this commitment will not make branding from the inside out happen for your organization if you don’t
have focus, perseverance and a clear strategy on make the shift from ‘Brand strategy’ to ‘Brand behavior’, because walking the talk is about creating habits that
stick.

So – how close are you to get what you want, right now?