For many of us, phone conversations are happening less and less compared to 10, or 20 years ago. The same trend is happening in business. Is it time to rebuild those verbal muscles?
Today we look at this evolution, and ask ourselves some relevant questions. Are we ready to receive, or make difficult phone calls? What happens when a simple business conversation takes a quick turn, and then suddenly things get heavy? Should business owners and operators look at telephone engagement as a trainable skill set, almost like an athlete who trains for the game? Would role-playing help our customer-facing associates? We layout vital questions that connect to Podcast E214, which airs on 11/23/23.
Alright , Mr . Simple Biz Sky . Let's fight to show.
Speaker 2:
Hello everybody, and thank you for tuning into this episode of This Simple Biz 360 podcast. My name is Jeff Mason, I'm your host for the next five minutes. And , uh, today we're gonna be looking at why we need to go to the telephone gym. Well, why, because our business telephone skills are eroding. They are, Hey, you can catch us on YouTube. Uh, I GT V , which is Instagram, rumble tv, and 28 listening platforms. So again, we're so psyched you're here and , uh, you know, just here's the why, right? Our business skills are just eroding. They are. So, you know, since the 19 hundreds, we've seen email come into Vogue and , and the propensity for co companies to transfer their communication to, you know , uh, emails versus phone. Uh , the managers and executives of of companies have been seen that phone usage go down. Then we couple that with the advent of texting and, and now texting's pretty darn good and quick and easy. And now we're blending in texting with emailing. So again, the usage on the phones go down and down and down. Now we got remote , um, work situations where people are, are, you know, working outta the house instead of offices or working outta the house three days a week in the office too. And , and companies are closing their phone systems down and they're, they're reverting to just cell phone , um, you know, options for customers. So, you know, we're even finding a trend going that way. And , and so as we, we look at all this, you , you know, the future generations, what , what's in it for those future generations in communication? Well, I can tell you, in my opinion, the phone usage is gonna go down and down again. So we're just have this steady decline and hopping on the phone and having a conversation with someone. You see it in your own families. You see it with your friends and loved ones. We're a microcosm of the society we live in. You know, the business just kind of clicks and drags and copies and pastes all that stuff into business 'cause it's convenient and people are used to it. So what is happening when we pick up that phone to initiate a phone call with a customer, or we answer the phone when we get a call from the customer? Well, you know, we're outta shape. We don't have our skill sets polished, we're not refined. Our use of the English vocabulary's not as tight as it was, you know, just rolling off the tongue. We , we , we find ourselves , um, hesitating. We find ourselves groping for the right words. There's the , the conversations can be awkward and clumsy and , and oftentimes end wrong. I'm , I'm , I'm , I'm in the middle of one of those that happened to me recently that way, which we'll talk about in the next episode a little bit. But, you know, it, it , it's, it's all this talking on the phone, the , the training on that just by usage on a day-to-day basis. It's just, it's evaporated, it's gone. So, you know, where do we go from here? Uh , you know, what are the options? Well, we should consider, you know , really doing a couple things when we're on the phone or getting ready to go on the phone that , um, we probably haven't thought about in a while. And, and so I suggest guardrails. You know, we, we often talk about business as being , uh, a simplistic highway on top of a mountain , and we're trying to go through the happy customer tunnel and what protects us from falling off the mountain. Well, those are guardrails on the side of the, of the road. So, same thing here. We need guardrails to put up to protect us in these conversations on the phone where we , um, you know, don't , don't, we don't do that often anymore. So rather than end up with a bad result, what do we do to end up with good results? Well, you know, we, we suggest courtesy, purpose, action. It's just the easiest way to to , to put three simple guardrail protectors up there that, you know, just, you , you get ready for that call or you get ready to answer that. You wanna engage in a simple formula of courtesy, purpose, and action to help us along with that. The other thing is get rid of distractions. Get ready for the , the business at hand. Don't be caught multitasking while you're on the phone with a , with a very , um, you know, critical , um, situation. Uh , because if, if you're multitasking and you're not, have your guardrails up, man, this thing could just go south. So again, we need to start going to the telephone gym, rethinking the use of the telephone, getting ourselves prepared, getting ourselves in the modality of doing business verbally, back and forth rather than electronically. And , uh, you know, so again, electronics still gonna be our main default, but we are gonna have to be prepared for these face-to-face , uh, or these , uh, phone to phone conversations. So , uh, today we are gonna dip back again. We're in that Fillmore, east West . Today we're gonna stick with Fillmore East. Oh man, this is a good one. Joe Cocker . Mad Dogs and Englishmen. They did a tuned feeling all right . Yeah, you've heard it, Dave Mason. You've heard it from the Traffic Boys. Well, this is it. Feeling all right , Friday, March 27th, 1970 Fillmore East. Enjoy it. We will see you in 168 hours.