Telephone Skills

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”

Ernest Hemingway

In today’s world, phone calls play an important part in our everyday communications in both personal and professional roles. Phone conversations deny us the benefit of making eye contacts or observing others body language to make our interaction more effective. Therefore it is of outmost importance to learn the skills necessary for handling a professional phone call and avoid misunderstandings and unnecessary challenges.

The rise of telephone services provided in global call centres and the expectation of consumers to get a good service no matter where they call has resulted in an ideal “etiquette”. This etiquette must be followed and mastered by anyone who relies on telephone conversations as a mean of communication with customers or colleagues. With the popularity of mobile phones people are now available almost anywhere and at anytime and knowing how to handle phone calls has become more important than ever before.

The best way to learn telephone skills is by example. The course is packed with examples and exercises. Many guidelines and scenarios are provided to help delegates understand how to handle various challenging situations. The course contains examples on both good and unhelpful phone conversations to familiarise participants with different responses and help them understand ways of dealing with a variety of possible situations.

As with all Skills Converged courses, this course heavily relies on Accelerated Learning principles which facilitates the transfer of knowledge as efficiently as possible. The course comes with comprehensive trainer guidelines, workbook and exercises which will help trainers to easily setup an effective learning environment.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

How to Serve People on the Phone

• What is it that callers are looking for?
• What do you want?
• What people don’t like about phone conversations?

How to Establish Rapport

• How to connect to callers emotionally
• How to control your tone of voice
• How to be emotionally skilled

How to Obtain Information

• How to ask efficient questions to get maximum amount of information
• How to minimise misunderstandings
• How to ask probing questions

How to Provide Information

• How to present data or guidelines so a customer can easily follow and understand
• What not to do when providing information?

How to Hold Telephone Conversations

• What are common situations you need to handle when on the phone?
• How to open phone conversations
• How to answer phones
• How to close a phone conversation
• How to put on hold
• How to transfer
• How to pick up someone else’s phone

How to Control Your Tone and Your Content

• How to structure your sentences
• How to get around the lack of body language signals
• How to talk with an appropriate rate of speech

How to Deal with Common Scenarios

• How to respond to angry, demanding or other types of callers
• What strategies can you use when you encounter difficult situations?

How to Listen

• How to exploit the power of listening skills
• How to show that you understand a callers request

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Understand callers’ mentality and adopt effective strategies to become more comfortable in handling any situation
• Handle emotionally charged conversations on the phone while staying in control
• Ask ideal questions from callers to maximise information transfer
• Handle your phone conversations professionally and leave a positive impression on the other person
• Handle phone calls based on the types of people you are communicating with
• Provide information clearly and efficiently while increasing retention and checking understanding
• Control your tone and voice, adopt an ideal attitude and choose words carefully to present a positive image of yourself and your services
• Handle challenging scenarios and common situations when interacting on the phone
• Listen actively to callers and demonstrate that you understand their needs

Making good phone conversations is all about knowing what to say, when to say and how to say it. All three require examples and a persistent attitude to practice until mastered. The course is designed from the outset to satisfy all three areas. We believe it is critical for learners to see how a conversation can fail before they are told how they should perform it. This is why the courses contains many examples of failed phone conversations in addition to effective and professional conversation suggestions that demonstrate how not to handle a particular situation.

Group exercises and role plays significantly help delegates to practice the guidelines provided. Many topics are repeated in subtle ways throughout the course to maximise retention. In our experience, just mentioning an ideal practice once is not good enough as it is easy for delegates to fall back to bad habits and forget it altogether. Repeated exposure to the content in addition to participation in real-life scenarios will significantly help delegates to master the techniques discussed in the course and indeed this is how this course is designed.