Back Page: Always communicating

We’ve all experienced it ­­— the fast-food cashier who “welcomes” you to the restaurant in the most bored, deadpan voice ever, or the sales representative who seems to turn his or her nose up at you, assuming you are below them and won’t buy whatever he or she is selling, or the friend who says they’re so “happy” for you when they seem anything but.

At the 2012 OFA Short Course in Columbus, Ohio, Denise Ryan addressed these communications in her presentation, “Takin’ care of business: it’s all about customer service.”

“It’s not as much what you do but how you do it,” says Ryan, who leads FireStar Speaking and is a professional motivational business speaker.

Any tone or body language that accompanies anything you or your employees say to customers is also a communication. She offered three tips for tone: inflection, volume and speed.

Inflection is the rise and fall in your voice. She suggests standardizing your phone greeting so it sounds the same regardless of who grabs it. She also says that smiling will make a difference. When someone comes to your business, the smile is warming to them. And while you’re on the phone, even if the caller can’t see your smile, smiles typically brighten a voice, so it will improve the tone over the line.

“Some companies put mirrors by the phone,” she says. “Some put happy face stickers to remind people. It seems not important, but it’s everything.”

The second tip was to control your volume.

“The best thing to do when someone is getting loud is to go lower,” Ryan says. “It’s hard to do, but if you can go lower, it will let that person know how loud they’re getting.”

Doing this will also calm and diffuse the situation. She says the only time you should raise your voice is when you need to reset or refocus people, and it should only be slight — not yelling.

The third tip was to focus on the speed of your speech.

“We tend to like people who speak at the same speed we do,” she says.

For instance, people in the South tend to think Northerners are impatient or hurried because of how fast they speak, while Northerners often think that Southerners are stupid because of their slow speech. We don’t like it when people don’t match our pace, and this is true in business. For example, if you leave your wallet at a restaurant, and you run back and burst in and rapidly explain that you left it and where you were sitting and ask if they had found it, you want the restaurant staff to speak with the same sense of urgency in their voice. If they speak really slow and say they’ll get to looking for it when they have a chance, you’re not going to be a satisfied customer.

She says, “If you match their speed, it says, ‘It matters to me too.’”
 

For more: FireStar Speaking, (919) 788-0291 or www.firestarspeaking.com