My phone voice is far shorter than I am, something I`ll have to work on.
On the other hand, it`s better dressed and has a more fashionable coif. Probably drives a nicer car, too, though Lori Miller, the professional expert on phone voices now performing this divining act, doesn`t hazard a guess.
She says my voice and phone manner tell her I am 5 feet 10 inches tall, in neat casual slacks and a dress shirt, with short, brown hair stylishly long in back. She sees me sitting up straight at a desk in a quiet corner of the Tribune Tower intently taking notes.
Miller and her business partner, Elanie Chudnovsky, call this little parlor game Telepicting, and it is the central feature of corporate training seminars in which they teach employees how to give better phone.
”Telepicting is just our name for something most of us do all the time,” Miller says. ”When you talk on the phone to people you`ve never met, you come up with a picture in your mind of their appearance, what they`re wearing, how old they are, what their office looks like and so on.”
I tell Miller I see her as 5 feet 5 inches tall with well-styled, shoulder-length brown hair. She`s dressed in solid business attire set off with, oh, say, kicky jewelry, and she`s perched at a tidy desk in one of those sterile, three-story, silk-plants-in-the-foyer suburban office buildings.
”The customers` impression of you on the phone has an immediate effect,” Miller says. ”You can make them feel welcome or irritated. If you`re helpful and accommodating, they start thinking the company must be doing a great job all around. If you`re rude, uninterested and lifeless, they think the company must be going down the tubes because it can`t even hire decent help.”
Miller is right about this, even though I`m actually nearly 7 inches taller than she thinks I am, my hair is blond and short in back and I`m wearing shorts and a University of Michigan T-shirt because I`m interviewing her from home. Vocal attitude makes an incredible difference in a world in which we so often shop, solicit, research, arrange and woo on the telephone.
I noticed this sharply not long ago when I called nearly 200 area high schools to gather information for a column on prom themes. It took five seconds at the most for me to tell whether the person who answered was going to be helpful and friendly or surly and uncomprehending, and my impression of the schools formed accordingly.
The best had good manners, of course, but also voices that revealed a little bounce and energy, humor and patience. These were good employees at good schools.
I`m right about this, even though I`m wrong about Lori Miller. In real life she`s barely 5 feet tall with very short, blond hair. She`s wearing almost no jewelry and, in fact, short pants because the headquarters of her two-person company, Tooty Inc., is in the cluttered basement of her Oak Forest home.
But Telepicting is not about the sort of literal accuracy one expects from the guy at the carnival who tries to guess your age and weight. It is about imagery. It is about how two people, each sitting around home in their shorts, can drop vocal clues back and forth that serve to fool the other into thinking he or she is in a real office wearing work clothes.
Miller and Chudnovsky formalized the Telepicting program last year and say they have taught it at about 50 companies nationwide. They begin by posing as customers and placing calls to selected employees. They then fill out detailed voice profiles meant to reveal to the employees what their telephone image ”looks” like.
They follow up with role playing and other exercises that emphasize not what the employees say but how they say it. ”The most common problem is lack of enthusiasm,” says Miller, who is 33 but sounds 32. ”Sometimes the training is almost like an acting lesson.”
”I was amazed at the difference in the way our employees came across on the phone,” said Tyson Helms, the marketing director at the Hyatt Regency Chicago who hired Tooty, Inc. (the name comes from science fiction and means
”ahead of the times,” Miller said) for Telepiction last year when he held a similar position at the Chicago Marriott.
”It opened our eyes to something we`d never thought about before,” said Helms, who sounds on the phone like the nicest man in the world, even though he may not be.
The point is that you don`t really have to care, you brusque, what-the-hell-do-you-want people out there. You just have to sound like you care. Make it a game, if you want. Fool us. Try to make us think you`re glad we called.
And if you want to sound tall, Miller says, try talking a little louder.
I know I am.
