You Think You Can Answer A Phone Call?
Ring! Ring! The phone is ringing! Each time the phone rang, I bit my lips, crossed my fingers and hope that someone would answer the phone instead of me. The longer it rang, the more anxious I would become. This fear might sound ridiculous for a PR student, but that’s me!
Of course, that only occurred in the beginning of my internship.
I have just officially marked off the completion of month two of my internship training from my calendar. So, let’s throw back to the first two weeks of my internship – I was always afraid that the phone would ring and no one was there to answer. There were a couple of silly reasons as to why I had this embarrassing fear as I started off.
FIRST, I was afraid to mess up. You see, here at Equatorial Hotel, we have a certain line of greeting to memorize as we answer the phone. It goes like this – “Good morning. PR department. This is Janice. How may I assist you?”. YES. I KNOW. It sounds simple and short, but for those of you who know the difference between theory and practical would probably understand. I was a newbie, so I could imagine myself stuttering and getting my tongue twisted the first time or two.
SECONDLY, I knew neither how to answer a phone call nor pass it over. Every desk was placed with a telephone, which operates with different extensions. I was clueless as to what buttons to click in order to answer the telephone call on behalf of my colleagues. I truly wanted to help, but in the beginning, I was just too afraid to ask. Nevertheless, fears are meant to be overcome. I asked my seniors and supervisors to show me the method so I could note them down and stick it on the wall, just above the telephone.
THIRDLY, I was worried if I did not possess the answers to their questions, or I did not answer well. Being observant plays a crucial role. I say this is because by listening to their phone conversations, I know what to answer during certain circumstances, as well as learning the art of telephone etiquette. I also learned that there are certain information that we cannot disclose over the phone; I learnt that there will be people out there trying to test your organization by using the words against you; I also learned that you should not let the phone ring more than twice before picking it up and greeting the caller.
As my supervisor once said, “People make mistakes. We allow them to make mistakes. They just need to admit.” These were words of encouragement for me. Sometimes, we as humans, are so afraid of making mistakes that we tend to avoid trying, or eventually lie. For my case, mistakes can lead to joy as well. Let me share a funny phone scenario.
ONCE, at 10.30 in the morning, I answered the phone and greeted as usual. Guess what was the reaction I received?
“Good afternoon?” She sounded surprised, “It’s only 10.30. Shouldn’t it be good morning?” the caller replied with a laughter.
“Oh, did I say good afternoon? Sorry, my bad. Good morning! How may I assist you?” I corrected with embarrassment.
Not only that, sometimes I don’t even know whether to feel privileged, or to feel unimportant when nobody actually calls me in particular. I should feel privileged because there are less distractions when I’m at work since no one calls me to specially disturb me. Yet, I joke about the fact that I feel insignificant because many a times, these are the scenarios when I answer a phone call:
*** SCENARIO A ***
“Can I find Ms.Marry?” asks, the caller.
“Sorry, she’s not in the office currently”, I answered.
“How about Ms.Helen?”
“She’s engaged on the phone at the moment”
“Ms.Olive?” the caller asked again, this time with a tinge of hope.
“Sorry, she’s busy having an interview now.” and the next thing I know, they hang the phone on me after saying a quick “thank you!”.
*** SCENARIO B ***
I picked up the phone as it rings, “Good afternoon. PR department. This is Janice. How may I assist you?”
“Sorry. Who’s this again?”, confirms the caller.
“This is Janice speaking. Trainee” I replied.
“Oh…trainee…hmm…Is there anyone senior there, like Ms.Marry, or Ms.Helen?”
“Oh ok. Please wait a moment while I direct you to her.”
As you can see… this is exactly why sometimes I had to joke with others, “How can I not feel petty?”. Well, I hope this blog post has served you well, and is somewhat relatable to some of you. Cheers!
The blurred lines between journalism and PR (Updated with my feature article!)
I was always aware of the link between journalism and PR. Many people here come from a journalism background. When I was approached to write a feature article I was pretty nervous. It was something that I had never done before. I always kind of assumed that the PR people gave the journalist the story to write, but in this case I was writing the story. I could see the purpose was definitely PR focused. I was writing an article that was for someone that was a significant player in an organisation. It was about establishing an image and legacy for him in his industry.
My first port of call when writing this article was to do some background research, I wasn’t sure who this guy actually was and what he did. I started on LinkedIn which thankfully had a reasonably extensive career history, I also had a look at the media release announcing his retirement. From here I started to piece together some of his key achievements. However, I still didn’t know much about the man personally and I needed to find out more information so I could actually paint a picture of him and help establish a legacy rather than just list a heap of achievements, I had been briefed to try and get his character to come through in the writing.
I conducted some phone interviews with people that he worked with. I designed questions that I thought would help me uncover more information. I headed into the quiet room for my first phone interview. The first one went really well and I managed to get two additional contacts as well which was great. I tried to keep some of my initial questions more open so I had an understanding of who I was talking to and to uncover the relationship that the person I was interviewing had with the person I was writing about, and then narrow the questions down into something more specific. At first I was a bit nervous about the phone interview, but it really just ran like a conversation that went on for about 20mins, and I was sure to write everything down and obtain as many interesting quotes as I could that I could put into my article.
One of the quiet rooms at PPR used to conduct phone interviews
Once I had conducted the interview I did a mind dump and wrote everything up into a word document, I did this for each of the interviews that I did. I then started to compile key themes from each person and place their information into a document that was surrounded by the background research that I had conducted, which allowed me to start building a narrative for the story, and ensure that everything was in a chronological order and had some kind of story arc to it. We also got one for the people that he worked with to take a look at the draft and see if he could identify any holes in the story, and also act as a kind of fact checker to ensure that I had got the information correct. It took a fair few drafts to get it right and was something that I worked on in chunks, bit by bit over a couple of weeks during my internship, but it was a rewarding process.
I left this post a bit late as I was expecting the article to be published in Oil and Gas Australia in the March addition but it seems it may not have made 🙁 I still thought I would share the process with my fellow interns though! If it does still get published I will be sure to share it with you.
IT GOT PUBLISHED!