Business English Meetings – Phrasal Verbs

Chair:

‘Thanks for coming to the meeting today. I’m sorry that we had to put off the meeting until today. It would have been better to have had the meeting last week as was originally planned. As I told you before, the last meeting was postponed because something very urgent came up, which meant that I couldn’t attend.

Everybody is here today except Peter Jenkins, who is on holiday. So Roger Wilson is standing in for him today in the meeting. Welcome Roger.

You’ll be happy to hear that we don’t have a lot to get through today. There are only three items on the agenda. So I’ll start by just running through the items on the agenda. The first item is about the recent changes to the customer service telephone project. The second item is about the problems at the Dublin Call Centre. And the last item is an update on the new government legislation.

The meeting is scheduled to last two hours. I’m sure that it won’t run over today. I believe that we’ll be finished after one and half hours. Before we start talking about the first item, I just want to inform you that this Saturday’s company cricket match has been called off. It seems that the weather forecast says that it’s going to rain all weekend. So you can relax at home.

So Jane, do you want to update us on the changes in the customer services telephone project.’

Jane:

‘Thanks Steve. First of all, the project is still on schedule. We haven’t run into any major problems. There was a small issue in testing, about 10% of calls were being lost. I’m pleased to tell you that we identified the problem and this has been sorted out. There has been a development with the automatic customer answering system. The Managing Director told us earlier this week that he didn’t like having a northern accent on the answering system and has asked us to change it to a southern accent. So … ‘

Chair:

‘Sorry Jane, going back to the problem with the lost calls. What was the problem?’

Jane:

‘Well, it was … ‘

Ian:

‘Sorry Jane, do you mind if I answer this?’

Jane:

‘No, go ahead.’

Ian:

‘There was a simple problem with the routing of the calls, which just required a reconfiguration. It won’t cause any more problems.’

Chair:

‘Ok. So Jane, about the accent, go on.’

Jane:

‘As I was saying, we have to change the accent. We’ve already hired someone to re-record the messages in a southern accent.

The last change is about me. I’m leaving the project on the 12th of May to start another project with the finance department. So, my colleague Tim Berridge will be taking over the role of Project Manager for the project on that date.’

Chair:

‘Sorry to hear that you’re leaving us. I just need to take down the date when you’re leaving the project. I forget things if I haven’t written them down. So you’re leaving the project on the 12th of May?’

Jane:

‘Yes.’

Simon:

‘Although it’s not connected, do you mind if I bring up an issue there is with the misuse of the internet by staff, which I’d liked to discuss with you all?’

Chair:

‘Simon, you’ll have an opportunity to talk about this later, but there are other issues that we need to talk about first.’

PHRASAL VERBS FOR BUSINESS MEETINGS