Communication Archive

Here are 10 quick tips to help you add polish at the podium, enjoy your public speaking experience and influence your listeners.

Customer complaints are inevitable. If you run a business that sells to the public no matter how great your goods or services are the old adage will eventually be proven true: You cannot please 100% of the people 100% of the time.

Most customer concerns can be dealt with simply by complying with the person’s reasonable requests. From time-to-time, however, you will come across those customers who will demand something that simply is unwarranted or impossible to deliver.

No matter the issue at the heart of the complaint it is important to remember these rules when resolving your customer service issues: . . .

Communication is an integral part of any work or life situation. Learning to be an effective communicator is a valuable productivity tool, one that is unfortunately commonly overlooked.

The consequences of poor communication can be disastrous; wasted time, hurt feelings, misunderstandings, unproductive meetings, ineffective teamwork, and lack of progress towards goals.

In order to be successful communicators we need to keep in mind some basic guidelines that are applicable in most instances of work, social or home environments. . .

Quite often when you are listening to a speaker, teacher or seminar leader, you are thinking to yourself that this person is either a really good presenter or a boring one.

For some reasons you are not totally sure of, you have put that person in your mind in one of these two classifications. . .

I spent the majority of my high school and college years as a Market Research Interviewer — i.e., telephone survey girl. And now my husband is a Customer Relations Specialist in his company’s Retention Department — meaning his job is to call up customers who’ve canceled, find out why, and (if possible) try to get them to change their minds.Let’s just say we both have plenty of experience dealing with angry people.

And when you’ve done it enough, you do more than just build up a thick skin — you also learn a few strategies that help bring a hostile person down to earth. Whether you’re faced with an upset client, a co-worker meltdown, or one of those bosses who communicates solely by yelling, keeping these pointers in mind can help de-escalate even the most volatile of situations. . .

Why are some presentations spellbinding and some not? Well, this is the question Nancy Duarte takes on in this video as she shares with the audience the secret of an excellent presentation.

In this fascinating talk Nancy Duarte explains the model that she developed for designing transformative presentations. She explains the essential qualities of an excellent presentation by analyzing the speeches of Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs.

She reminds us that the only way to spread important ideas is to make sure that one is communicating his or her ideas effectively using strong presentation skills.

Learn proper international business card etiquette in this video.

In reality, of course, it's not always possible to meet in person, so email wins out. How, then, do people react to persuasion attempts over email?

Persuasion research has uncovered fascinating effects: that men seem more responsive to email because it bypasses their competitive tendencies. Women, however, may respond better in face-to-face encounters because they are more 'relationship-minded'.

But is this finding just a gender stereotype?

Meetings can be like torture chambers. But they don't have to be. Web conferencing company SalesCrunch has created a guide to meetings.

It's gathered the data from its management software, which tracks things like if people are really paying attention (looking at the screen or not), and if follow-up materials are opened. . .

Here is an interesting website that lists English idioms relating to food.

Have you noticed how obsessed we all are with getting things right? Not only that, but doing the right thing quicker and better than ever before.

Everywhere you turn, there are books, magazines and blogs dedicated to making sure we have the secrets of success so we don’t screw up. In the face of all this rampant perfectionism, it’s easy to overlook the importance of being OK without getting it wrong now and then. . .

Leading business bloggers say the perceived authenticity of a CEO plays a critical role in how they assess a leader's abilities and performance overall . . .

Asked to name the top 5 phrases that raise concerns about a lack of authenticity, the bloggers cited the following: