New Plantronics Speech Impact Academy Helps Customers Harness the Power of Voice for Improved Business Performance

Decline in Business Travel has made Telephone Interaction more Crucial than Ever; Speech Impact Academy Features Europe’s Leading Communication and Presentation Expert

Plantronics have announced the new Speech Impact Academy, a programme designed to maximise and dramatically improve a company’s business performance by harnessing the power of the voice over the phone. The Speech Impact Academy features proven audio techniques and methodologies from Tony Crawford, Europe’s leading communication and presentation expert. 

With the significant reduction in business travel worldwide – due to budget cuts, environmental impact, etc – business is increasingly being conducted via telephone, and therefore speech quality, intelligibility and the content delivered over the phone has become more critical than ever. When conducting business over the phone, body language is completely replaced by tone of voice, which accounts for 87%[1] of the communication model, with the actual words used only accounting for a mere 13%[2] of total effectiveness.  

“Plantronics has played a central role in telephony conversations for nearly 50 years and recognises that the projection of one’s ‘voice signature’ during business conversations and presentations is vital,” said Philip Vanhoutte, Managing Director, Europe, Middle East and Africa, at Plantronics.  “By tuning one’s voice with pace, pause, power and pitch, professionals can be more influential and effective during phone conversations, giving companies a competitive edge.”   

“The importance of ‘voice presence’ is not only on the rise, it is proving crucial to the way that today’s most successful companies do business,” said Tony Crawford, founder of Crawford Communications. “Our aims are simple when talking business on the phone: Can we be heard clearly? Are we engaging? Are we understood? These crucial factors are heightened with language barriers and a prevalence of jargon in business. Finally, are we stimulating our audience to take some action as a result of what we've had to say? This is exactly what Speech Impact will be helping Plantronics to construct and deliver for its clients.” 

Business results to be addressed by the Speech Impact programme include the following:

-                      Shorter more productive meetings

-                      Less misunderstanding within teams

-                      Increased sales

-                      More customer loyalty

-                      Enhanced reputation

-                      More motivated team members

-                      Improved return on investment

Speech Impact was created to engage, train and motivate all levels of management and staff with a high-value education programme to improve business results. The course has been trialed with demonstrable results and the programme will now be available for all Plantronics clients in from March onwards. Pricing for clients will be from €385 plus VAT per person for groups of ten.

4th March 2010