Favorite Kinds of Phone Calls
I hesitate to blog much about my interactions with clients because of confidentiality ethics and I don’t want people not to use my services because of a fear I might blog about it. Please understand that it is not my intention to make fun of anyone nor to reveal the identity of anyone who might approach me for assistance unless they consent to me naming them specifically.
I want to tell you about two of my favorite kinds of phone calls because some of you will relate to my experiences and some of you will learn something that will help you leave a voice mail message or interact with an information owner better.
I am perpetually frustrated by voice mail messages where people don’t speak their name or phone number clearly. Some people take the attitude that if it’s important enough, the person not leaving a clear message will call back. I try to be responsive, especially to reporters on deadline, and feel bad when I’m stymied by such sloppiness.
Many times, people ask for information I don’t have. When I tell them I don’t have it and usually make a referral to another place that might, sometimes the inquirer goes into a lengthy explanation about why s/he would like the information. I don’t know if the person expects me to magically produce the information after such an explanation or what. That kind of interaction makes me shake my head and smile.
February 19th, 2005 at 7:29 am
I used to have the “who is this message from and what is their phone number” problem All The Time when I worked. For years, my own outgoing voice mail message said, You’ve reached Lisa Williams. Remember to say your phone number Nice And SLOW, so I can write it down…Have a great day and I’ll be talking to you soon!
This actually made a big difference in the intelligibility of peoples’ phone numbers. I still wish PBX phones (phones attached to an internal office system with things like extensions) did a better job with capturing Caller ID and giving it back to you when you listened to messages…I’d love to have that feature on my cell phone, too — why can’t it show the caller’s number on the screen as I listen to the voice mail? It knows the time of the message, so it could just look in the call log for the Caller ID at that time…
February 24th, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Explaining the reason for the information request may provide an opportunity to suggest or provide an alternative form of information which may fulfill their underlying need.