Nina Kochchar, a `catalyst' trainer with the consultancy, says her job is to make clients understand the importance of tone, body language and listening skills in the communication process. ``I personally believe that if we have control overour tone, we would have control over our lives. We are very conscious of the tone we are hearing, but most of the time, we are very unconscious of the way we speak,'' says Kochhar, who worked with the Oberoi group of hotels for 25 years and coordinated there the training of the first batch of students in their school of hotel management.

In India, the behaviour of the staff is fine till the point of purchase. After that, the phenomenon of `post-purchase dissonance' seeps in and often taints the credibility of a company. The frontline employees, who deal with the public-cashiers, security guards, personnel-behave according to how important they feel the person is. ``They attach an importance to the question and tackle it accordingly, whether it will make a positive contribution to the image of the organisation or not. Also, in a customer service organisation, you can't expect the frontline to be great and deliver service to the paying customer, if you don't provide good service to the internal customers. 80per cent of the services get bogged down since communication within the organisation is not happening,'' says Upaul Majumdar, another `catalyst' trainer, who worked with Jet Air and Air Canada before joining the consultancy. Majumdar cites the example of Reliance Telecom who were operating in nine telecom circles, including Patna. ``Their customer service staff, many of them MBAs from the top institutes of the country, were thrown into a totally new marketplace. In Patna, if you see a person walking into your office wearing a dhoti and kurta, he could be a peon, a businessman, or the richest guy in town, because that's the way the people dress. The business community in non-metro cities are not always into power dressing. That does not mean the person attending to them should convey: `Kya chahiye?' (What do you want?), instead of a `Good morning, sir'. The people felt insulted. After a mystery customer audit, we concluded that the problem was body language, because the consumers felt that they were beingignored or looked down upon,'' recalls Majumdar.

Here, body language, the second component of good communication, came into play. The managers were imparted knowledge about the importance of open gestures like keeping a smile on their face, bending slightly from the waist and avoiding closed gestures like crossing their hands across the chest. Nuances like these help not just in customer service, but in sales, too. A salesman can immediately judge when the customer had made up his mind to buy the product, based on body language.

Tones can be busy, angry, preoccupied, enthusiastic, bored, business-like, pleasant or `professional'. `` There is no formula for a uniform tone-we can only make the person aware of the differences of tone and therebyhelp him modulate it to his requirement,'' says Kochhar.

Today, customers seek value for money all the time. Therefore, when a customer feels that he has got lower value, he makes his views known to the company in strong terms. It all begins with an angry voicesaying ``I didn't know the washing machine I was buying would trouble me so much.'' This aggressiveness gets reflected in the tone and body gestures. To counter that, the person on the other end of the line either becomes very aggressive, which is very bad for the organisation, or becomes very submissive and will do everything for the consumer.

The aggression that the customer service person absorbs will be let off somewhere else. For instance, a cellphone company may over-charge a client. The client will shout at the customer service person. In turn, he will shout at his colleague in accounts and say, ``Because of you guys, this customer shouted at me, you are the most inefficient guys in the company. When it reaches a head, they start blaming each other's manner of speech.

Ultimately, it boils down to interpersonal skills and body language. What they are complaining about is the tone and not the content. That is how tone plays such an important role in the organisation,'' says Majumdar.

Upgrade doesa lot of role-playing in the classroom to drive home the importance of tone and body language. ``We divide the class into groups of three-a customer, an attendant and an observer and undertake the exercise of complaint handling. Here the observer notes how an aggrieved customer comes in and how the attendant responds to him,'' explains Kochhar.

Then they help them make resolutions on the follow-up action. Companies that want serious change have similar workshops for supervisors and managers. ``This way, down the line, people start changing the way they interact with people,'' says Majumdar.

And the best way to tackle an irate customer? ``If somebody speaks to you in an angry voice, and you respond in an uptight voice, it will build up the tension. If on the other hand, if you can keep your voice comfortable and low, he will have to bring it down to your level,'' concludes Kochhar.