CHAPTER 2

THE CHALLENGE OF TELEPHONE COMMUNICATION

One of the most important aspects of your day-to-day interactions with customers and coworkers, friends and family, is your nonverbal communication—the things you don’t say. The way you stand or move, the clothes you wear, the gestures you make, everything that you don’t say sends a far stronger message than the actual words you use and even the way you use those words.

Given the subtlety and importance of nonverbal communication, it’s a wonder we can communicate over the telephone at all! And yet, for most businesses the telephone is a major lifeline—often the number one medium of communication. The telephone compresses time and space. It allows you to communicate over long distances not possible with face-to-face communication. The telephone has an immediacy that the mail cannot rival. And it allows interaction in a way not possible through broadcast television or radio.

THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS

Whether you are communicating face-to-face or via the telephone, the communication process itself remains the same. Figure 1 illustrates the six elements involved in every communication act: (1) the sender, (2) the channel of communication, (3) the receiver, (4) feedback, (5) the physical environment, and (6) the sender and receiver’s psychological environment.

It is important to understand each of the six communication elements and how they interact:

Whether you are sender or receiver during a phone conversation, you have 100 percent of the responsibility to make sure that the message is understood correctly. As sender, you must present your message in the way it will be best understood by the receiver. As receiver, you must provide feedback either by asking for clarification or acknowledging understanding.

When you communicate your message via the telephone, you have to craft it more carefully than when you communicate face-to-face. Effective phone communication is short and to the point, while remaining cordial. It includes requests for feedback as well as silent time to allow that feedback to be communicated.

The physical apparatus of the telephone can distort the sound of your voice and make your words difficult to understand. In addition, the telephone eliminates nonverbal communication, so the importance of verbal communication skills—including the way you manage subverbals such as “uh huh” and “hmmm” and other sounds you make to indicate you are listening—is increased.

One of the reasons that nonverbal communication is so powerful is that it gives us clues about a person’s psychological environment. If you call a woman customer “Honey” in a face-to-face situation, and you see her eyes narrow and her face get red, it’s a pretty clear indication that you’ve offended her. And after you see that, you have a chance to make things right. But when you talk on the telephone, when such clues are lacking, it is critically important that you know your caller’s “hot buttons” before you place the call, or at least that you are extra sensitive to the way your message may be interpreted or misinterpreted by the person on the other end of the line.

Unlike face-to-face communication, telephone communication means that you and the caller will be in different physical environments. Your message may compete with distractions beyond your control—office noise, interruptions, uncomfortable temperature, or a large window overlooking a lake where your customer would rather be! Listen for background noise clues. They may prompt you to ask, “Is now a good time for our phone call?” or “Am I speaking loud enough?” When you compete with outside distractions, your telephone message has to be interesting to your caller and straight to the point.