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Discussion on: Importance of summarizing the points talked over phone

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Angel Paudel

Phone conversation includes of two individuals each at opposing end using informal speech to express their ideas, views or to pass some information about a topic for general discussion, service or work (Bell & Smith, 2006). This is a lot different from any other spoken form of communication like speech or a presentation where you tailor the contents according to the audience to ensure that they understand the ideas, views in a clear, easy to understand language.

Even if telephonic conversation is one of the fastest and the easiest way to interact. Being overconfident and thinking that you can memorize everything will often backfire. At times the audio quality could be unclear while it’s equally possible to understand what the other person said in your own way which might be different from what the other person told (Dubovskaya, 2013). Thus, it’s important to make sure that you do have a summary of the points that you’ve covered in a phone conversation. Here are few more points to stress it further:

  • To ensure that you understood what the other person wants and not the way you want to understand. Given that the network quality in Nepal isn’t always good, at times you might not be able to hear the other person clearly which is very easy to result in miscommunication. Also, a person can be doing anything during a phone call so if the points are summarized at the end, which reduces the risk of having a significant misunderstanding.

  • Helps you pass the message quick for action. Maybe you’re working in the restaurant business and the other person calls for ordering food, it’s smart to summarize what the other person said as that way you’ll be able to ensure that’s what the other person wants is what you wrote down as well. That helps to reduce the error of sending a wrong food and hampering the user experience.

  • Helps to remember the key points during the phone conversation. Especially during the long phone conversation, it’s hard to remember all the things discussed during the talk so summarizing helps to ensure that such things doesn’t happen.

  • To ensure that the correct information is gathered. You may be on a call to get information about a certain car or any product. Summarizing everything at the end will let you know that you’ve the key details jotted down and not missed. While otherwise, few of the key details could quite easily be missed.

  • Ensure that both the person are on the same page and understand things in the same way. This also helps each other recall what has been discussed during the conversation to freshen up the memory.

References

Bell, A. H., & Smith, D. M. (2006). Management Communication. New York: Wiley.

Dubovskaya, O. (2013). Business telephone communications. Modern Communication Studies , 2 (3), 21-24.