I want to talk today about the importance of accuracy and specifically as it pertains to someone’s name.

Now, some of you watching this have a complicated name. Even a simple name though, like Smith might be S-M-I-T-H or S-M-Y-T-H or S-M-Y-T-H-E. Now, Erica could be with a K or a C. Eric could be with a K or a C. My name is Labalme, it’s a French name. And people more often misspell it, then get it accurate. Which is extraordinary, because it’s partly how we can tell how conscientious someone is in their emails to me. I mean, it’s at the bottom of my email signature when I reply. And people still reply back with a capital B, with an L-E instead of an L-A. And, to me it just is an indication of a lack of awareness and attention to detail.

And, as a professional, I think it’s critical to get someone’s name accurate. Over the years I’ve gotten so many misspellings of my name and it used to really upset me. Then I thought, “Well, how do I take something that I can’t fix, and instead feature it?” So what I started to do was collect all the misspellings of my name that came in the mail. And I got many, many, dozens. And then we created a poster of all the misspellings. I’m going to show you that poster here, so it looks like this.

But some of them on here…and to be clear, this is sometimes when I’m the keynote speaker and they still get it wrong.

So, this one says, Vicotria Lebalm. Vicotria. This one says, I don’t know if you can see it, Virginia. I’m the keynote speaker. It says, Virgina L-A, capital B. We have Laboum, Lacalm, Lasalme, Labaloney, Lagalme. It goes on and on.

So, not only that, here’s another one that’s even more glaring. Recently I gave a keynote speech and I’m going to cover up the client name. Now, this was for their administrative professionals. Think about this. The administrative professional job is to be accurate and get details correct, people’s names, all these data entry points.

They print up this beautiful foam cork poster board with my name on it. Here, Administrative Professionals Board presents keynote Victoria Lebalme.

So, I want you to think very carefully. When someone calls your office, you can train your staff this or you can answer this yourself. You need to ask,
“How do you spell your name? I want to make sure I get it correctly.” Because once it’s in the database wrong. Oh, my gosh. It goes everywhere.

So, how careful are you? And, how careful is your staff when it comes to getting people’s name correctly? Are you winging it? Are you just taking a guess? Or, do you really show how much you care?

Let us know what you thought of that. Put your comments below and we’ll be in touch!