With customers, stay positive
In customer service, little thingsâand little sayingsâmean much. Listen for the following customer-repellent phrases and train your people to trade them in for more effective ones.
Category: Communication
Nothing grabs attention like a good story
Telling stories or anecdotes is a great way to illustrate important ideas or to inspire your group to recognize opportunities. But what makes a good story?
Power up your responses
Some wordsâno matter how trivial they seemâcan make you look less sure, professional and capable. Make these small tweaks in your language to appear more confident and competent.
Clean up your writing
Quiz yourself on these grammar rules.
Filler up!
We all use filler words, or vocal disfluencies, in our daily speech. The junk food of the applied linguistics world, they come off as sloppy and faltering. We should try to banish them, especially from our professional speech as much as possible. Right? Well, not necessarily.
3 questions on SharePoint and Flow
Alerts on libraries … Approvals … Automating log updates
Grace your text with a lasting gloss
For your image as a thorough professional, these tips from EEI Communicationsâ âHow to Produce Winning Publications on Time and on Budgetâ are vital when putting the finishing touches on business (and even personal) communication.
In praise of the paraphrase
One of the most overlooked tools in clear communication is the paraphraseâsummarizing what youâve just heard so that you confirm you understood what the other person just said. This is such a simple, basic aspect of communicating effectively, but so often people ignore it, and it leads to all kinds of problems down the line.
What your hands are revealing about you
In discussions of body language, theâhands are often overlooked; more emphasis is frequently given to posture, the face or the position of the shoulders. Joe Navarro discusses the messages that hands can send in an article for Psychology Today.
âWhere will I find images for this?â
There are lots of occasions to use stock images, both at work and for personal projects. There are tons of places to hunt, too, so a little expert guidance is helpful.