Telephone Etiquette

Telephone etiquette means being respectful to the person you are talking with, showing consideration for the other person's limitations, allowing that person time to speak, communicating clearly and much, much more.

Your voice must create a pleasant visual impression over the telephone.

Good phone etiquette is important because we cannot see the facial expressions and body language of the other person and they cannot see us.

We must compensate by choosing our words carefully and using much more tone inflection to convey our message than if we were face to face.

Sadly, despite this, billions of dollars are spent annually on the various means of excluding the human factor from communication.

We regularly have to deal with impersonal recorded messages on voice mail that direct us to select a number from a menu or to leave a recorded message.

This is becoming standard business practice and a challenge to good phone manners when we are finally able to talk to a person.

We also encounter an ever increasing number of answering machines. These are a useful adjunct to the telephone and used judiciously will enable us to augment our telephone manners.

We get desperate to talk to a real live person and when we do find a human being we are dismayed to find the person lacks the basics of good telephone manners.

Children need to be taught to use the telephone to communicate respectfully and this is covered in Kids Telephone Etiquette.

Rudeness and a lack of consideration have surreptitiously crept into our telephone practices and in many cases we are unaware of this.

This site provides some tried and tested Tips on Telephone Etiquette to help us brush up on our manners.

The principles apply equally to cell phone (mobile phone) communication. Mobile phones are just that.

They are mobile, and place you in environments where your phone and your conversation are not welcome and may even be considered offensive.

Lastly, a very convenient and useful feature of many phones is the speakerphone button.

This makes communication so much easier, but it too requires the exercise of good manners and judgement.

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