Education staff learn telephone etiquette

DUBAI // When a significant part of your day is spent fielding calls from anxious parents or helping connect harassed teachers to the right official, a lesson in telephone etiquette can only help. This week, 50 Ministry of Education employees from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, put their normal routine on hold to learn the secrets of keeping the customer satisfied. The two-day course covered subjects such as greeting callers and transferring calls. Organised by the ministry's institutional excellence department, the training was attended by telephone operators and secretarial staff. It is part of a larger move to raise the bar for employees of the government agency and is in line with the federal strategy to develop a more skilled public sector workforce. A key part of the ministry's reform agenda is enhancing the skills of its workforce, which was recently reduced from 371 to 216 employees. To ensure the lessons have been learnt, weekly evaluation reports on the telephone service will be compiled and presented to Rashid al Nuaimi, the ministry's director general. klewis@thenational.ae