Fifty five percent of the impact of a communication is determined by the visual aspects so how do staff members who work with our customers on the phone build trust and confidence in our products and services? Only 7% of the impact of their communication is the actual words, the content or the verbal message. Yet that is what we spend so much time carefully crafting!
For phone personnel that makes that 38% impact of voice quality very, very important. Voice quality includes tone, softness or loudness, accents, grammar, volume, tempo, rhythm, inflections--in other words how we say it. These figures come from a study done in 1983 by Dr. Albert Mehrabian of UCLA. It makes sense to spend some of our training time for receptionists, phone banks, call centers in the "how we say it" aspect rather than only the "what we say" aspects.
We can build trust, believability and confidence with our voice by being a bit of an actor or actress when we are on the phone. That "Hello, how may I help you?", can be said many ways. Spend a little time with your folks trying out different voice tones for that one expression.
At your next meeting do a little practice and role modeling. Ask your employees what cheerful sounds like. What does helpfulness sound like? What does "I am bored and you are bothering me" sound like? What does hectic and hurried sound like? What does "I care about your problem" sound like? What does professionalism sound like?
At some point someone will go overboard and lay it on too thick. That's great. Ask the group what that sounded like. Insincere? Phony? With practice your employees can strike a balance that wins your customers trust and loyalty. They can create a visual image in the customer's mind. Then that 7% content can work for you.
An added bonus to this is that when people sound cheerful they tend to become cheerful. So after that call where the customer told you where you could put your product, take a breath and practice cheerful. In a few minutes you will be feeling it too. And after all why would you want to stay frustrated?
