Okay, I've been holding off on this part of the course. Now I gotta let it all hang out here and be totally candid with you. There are in fact, some generational issues when it comes to how the phone is used different people have different generations use the phone differently. I'm not here to advocate for anyone generate no one generations better than the other. It's just different. But here's the thing.

If you are in business or running a business or an employee in a business, with very few exceptions, you're going to try to appeal to people of all sorts of generations. If you're in a bigger organization, there may be people from 60 to 80. Working in your organization, if you have any kind of a business, it could be manufacturing designer t shirts. Yeah, maybe most of your customers are 22 years old, but you might have some that are 75 years old buying something for their grandchild. Why needlessly alienate any customer or any prospect? So I'm advocating that you essentially become, you know, multilingual, fluent in generation speak when it comes to dealing with the telephone.

And different people are bad at different things. Believe me, I know people my age and older people who were pitching and screaming for 10 years refusing to use text. Well, if a client sends you a text question, you should text back the answer. So that's the fault of people my age and older, who were grumpy. Stick in the muds not open to new things. That was a problem that hurt them in business communication, because let's face it these days, you could be 62 years old and have a 28 year old boss and some corporations.

A 28 year old send you a text at 3pm they're gonna want a text answer response. If they're in another city or another location, or maybe even down the hall, they don't necessarily want you to get up or walk all the way down there, send them a big memo or call them, they just want to text back. So I want you to realize I'm not here is just a grumpy old man criticizing the young ones. Old people can be very guilty of not adapting to new technology and new uses of the phone. A lot of older people could say, Oh, I don't want to do Skype, video or zoom, because they're nervous about the fact that their hair's falling out, and they got wrinkles and gels. So every age group has certain blind spots.

So now that I've gotten that over the way, let's talk about a big problem with a lot of young people in the workplace. Again, we talked at the very beginning of this course about the difference between Private Life, social life and business life. I know a lot of people I have young nieces and nephews, where, if I were to call them it would be considered just a ridiculous absurd breach of etiquette, almost obnoxious. If I were to leave him a voicemail message, beyond the pale, it will not be listened to and it will not be returned. And we get along perfectly fine. We have a fine relationship.

It's just that's not how people have a certain generation 18 1920 like to communicate, as they're, of course, they're exceptions. And of course, I'm making some generalizations here. But I'm just trying to be helpful. There are certain people have certain generations where you just don't answer the phone. It's just not something you do, you'll see someone called and that's kind of a reminder to send them a text or you're going to bump into them later. You just don't answer the call.

Well, if you do that in business, you may be fine if absolutely every single person you deal with every investor, every client, every customer is your age group to the how often does that really happen? If you have clients, customers, colleagues, investors, other people calling you pick up the phone, answer it. If you're in a critically important meeting, obviously don't. But if you're not doing something wildly important that takes 100% of your attention, answer the phone. People hate it when they can never get ahold of account representative, our marketing director that's supposed to be in charge of their campaign, they hate it, they absolutely can't stand it. If they're, let's say over 40 or a certain age, younger people may think no problem.

I'll send a text. You have to realize everyone is different. And if you're Dealing with a customer or client prospect, they expect you to bend to them. If they're the ones writing a check if they're the ones paying you, in the form of being a customer or a client or a boss, they expect you to bend to them. They don't really care the way you want to communicate. Sorry if that sounds cynical, I just think that's human nature.

And we have to reflect that. It's selfish for you to expect people to bend to your needs. Again, if it's your company, and you want to run it the way you want to and you don't really care. If you alienate people, then by all means, don't change. But the first thing I really want to stress is you've got to answer the phone. That leads us to the next topic, voicemail and there are generational issues here too.

But there are people who are guilty of all ages, on bad voicemail etiquette that in the next lecture