About

Velvet Talk Management (formerly ITBI) is a reputation management consulting firm. Its primary service is conducting ‘Friendliness Audits’, which it pioneered to help companies identify and reduce employee behavior that is unfriendly to customers and co-workers. Related and follow-on services include communication skills training and online reputation reporting and repair.

“Unfriendliness creates bad word of mouth, which has accelerated with the rise of social media tools online.”


ABOUT OUR FRIENDLINESS AUDITS:

Essentially the process is to take random samples of external and/or internal communications from employees, like email and voice mail, as appropriate, and then run them through a sophisticated piece of software that uses proprietary algorithms and statistical analyses to detect patterns of friendliness or unfriendliness in the language.  The preliminary scores generated by the software are then also qualitatively assessed by a person for added accuracy.  


ABOUT OUR ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT SERVICE:

Online Reputation Management
Online reputation monitoring, reporting and repair

Beyond the ‘real world’, companies not managing their reputations online can see their reputations quickly spiral out of control.  This can scare away current and future business.

Velvet Talk Management can conduct positive article marketing campaigns that push down search engine rankings of bad comments.  We can also actively monitor online communities and reduce the impact of negative comments by replying accordingly or by informing your staff for their response.  By negotiating with webmasters we can often also have damaging, unsupported accusations removed from websites.

To do all this, we use professional bloggers who are connected and attuned to the particularly sensitive  social media universe.

"I believe in the value of paranoia. … I believe that the prime responsibility of a manager is to guard constantly against other people’s attacks and to inculcate this guardian attitude in the people under his or her management.”

Andrew Grove, Senior Advisor and former CEO, Intel

COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING:  HOW WE TRAIN YOUR STAFF TO BE FRIENDLIER

Every client is different (either a little or a lot) and training is tailored accordingly.  Certain elements are typically part of the core training offering, though, and these include:

■ Targeting training to previously identified staff in need (identifying candidates via our Friendliness Audit is recommended.  To see why, read the section entitled, “Why not just conduct customer and employee surveys?”)
■ Conducting interactive group lectures and private interview sessions as needed.  We often employ role play that is captured on video and analyzed in session.  Also common are joint analyses of past intra/extra company communications and fluid
■ Q & A sessions
■ Training staff in how to build friendly rapport:
   - by email
   - by telephone
   - face to face
■ Providing personalized assessments and recommendations to all finishing participants

We cannot make your staff perfect in their interactions, but we can improve them, sometimes a lot (^_^)