Telephone skills are the skills needed when working as an operator, when dealing with a company’s customers. Effective telephone skills are predicated on strong communications skills, thus telephone skills ensure the ability to deal with phone calls in a polite and adequate manner- either forwarding them to their destination, taking a message, or arranging for a call back if a person is unavailable. Message taking should be accurate and date/time stamped so the absent person can deal with messages in the order they were received.