It’s difficult to use the right honorific expressions on the phone. The point is to make the position clear between “you and the other end” or “inside and outside.” When you are talking about in-house people, you should use modest expressions just as you do when referring to yourself. For example, suppose there’s a call for President Suzuki. Inside the company, you would usually call him Suzuki shachô, which means “President Suzuki” However, to outside people you drop any honorific title or official titles of people in your company. So in this case you would say, Suzuki wa gaishutsu shite imasu, literally meaning “Suzuki is out at the moment.”
Incidentally, the most common surnames in Japan are Sato, Suzuki and Takahashi. But there are many other surnames and some sound very similar. If you cannot catch someone’s surname the first time, it’s best to ask them politely to repeat it without hesitation. In that case, you say Mô ichido, o-namae o onegaishimasu, meaning “Could I have your name again, please?”
