Best Way to Answer a Business Phone?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. Many companies today answer their phone with a long winded answer. As a customer, I find it annoying and distracting. Which do you think is best?

A. In fact, it is management-babble, a sort of Orwellian Newspeak that comes out of the mouths of people who draft "mission statements" that consist mainly of superlative adjectives making claims that, on the face of them, are false. Managers that make people do this sort of thing should be shot. When I was a kid, we had a man from the telephone company come to speak with us at school, probably around third grade. He explained that the key to using the phone was to keep your call short and get your business done while being polite about it. Anything that extends the call needlessly is a bad idea, especially if it's possibly offensive and condescending to the customer like this is. It's very popular, because it's easy for managers to do this and get a notion that they're making their employees care about customer service. In fact, this sort of thing makes employees LESS apt to care about really taking care of customers. You've put your finger on it. It seems to imply a low opinion of the hearer's intelligence: "We think we can bamboozle you with empty exaggeration."

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