A company recently brought me in to help them identify what their customer service agents were doing well and where changes needed to be made.
Within the first 10 minutes of listening to calls, I recognized a consistent communication breakdown. A call would come in, the agent would try to lead them down a certain path, and the caller would give the agent an objection.
The agent’s natural response was to defend their original position and work really hard to make the caller see their perspective. However, what they really did was dismiss the caller’s concerns, create more tension, and get emotionally involved in the conversation.
Sound familiar?
Here are three best practices customer service or inside agents should use to maintain their emotional composure and keep the conversation going.
- Don’t get defensive – If you get defensive, you will get emotional. If you get emotional, you will lose.
- Validate their feelings, point of view, or concern - Replace the phrase “Yes, but….” with “That makes sense, another way to think about it is…” By acknowledging their feelings, point of view, and concern, you put a comma in the conversation versus a period.
- Seek to understand vs. seeking to reply – Instead of trying to simply overcome the objection, you will get better results if you try to understand the “what” behind the objection. You can do this by validating and asking a question. For example, “I understand you are concerned about X. Just so I have some context, can you share with me why X is important to you.”
By combining psychology and processes, companies can exponentially increase the effectiveness of customer service and inside agents.
If you’d like L’areal to shadow your customer service/inside agents, you can reach her at L'areal@SalesMadeEasy.com
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