The call center constitutes the heartbeat of an organisation’s customer care efforts. Agents play a critical role in ensuring business success. How agents deal with consumers greatly influences an organisation’s fortunes and it is only when call center operators are able to uniquely perform their roles that they can be distinguished from answering services provided by automated answering software.
A study by Beta Research Corporation of the United States on: “Customer Satisfaction as it Relates to Call Center Experience,” and published on the Corporation’s website on November 14, 2007, revealed that most people prefer speaking with live representatives rather than receiving services from automated answering machines. The study also revealed that how operators handle clients from the beginning of a call to the end can influence a company's relations with its clients positively or negatively. Customer service staff need to be masters of phone manners.
The following are essential tips on how to have a fruitful and positive interaction with clients on the phone.
How to Receive Telephone Calls
How an inbound call is received can influence the success of a customer-agent conversation. Agents should be to clearly demonstrate how different they are from automated answering services.
Gary Case and Patrice Rhoades-Baum offered the following useful tips on receiving a call, in their publication: “How to Handle Difficult Customers,” published by the Help Desk Institute (HDI) in 2004:
- Answer by third ring
- Greet the customer
- Speak clearly and audibly
- Give the client your undivided attention
- Identify yourself and your department
- Smile because the consumer can feel it from the agent’s tone and voice
- Offer help when it is needed and
- Note the person's name and use it when need be.
“Start out on a positive note—those first few seconds set the tone for your entire conversation,” Case and Rhoades-Baum advise.
Handling a Phone Conversation
Once a conversation starts on a positive note, the agent has to ensure that it continues successfully and satisfactorily till the end. An essential element for ensuring this is effective listening. “The first technique is to listen for the central idea and to concentrate on what they are saying to you …listen between the lines,” Case and Rhoades-Baum, recommend. It is important for an agent to remain calm, unemotional and enthusiastic during a conversation irrespective of how provocative a customer may be.
Case and Rhoades-Baum also recommend that agents need to ignore disruptions or uncomfortable surroundings, ask questions, respond to questions with short messages, repeat or paraphrase messages and try to visualise the customer’s problem.
How to End a Call Positively
“Ending a telephone call can seem to be a simple matter. Yet, when it comes to customer satisfaction, you need to place as much emphasis on concluding a telephone call as you do on your initial greeting,” said Case and Rhoades-Baum. There is a need to maintain the positive and friendly attitude with which a call was received. Case and Rhoades-Baum emphasise that it is important to use the customer’s name, review plans of action, offer a further assistance, thank him or her for calling and finally making sure that the consumer is finished and hangs up before the agent does. When these tips are followed, calls from customers can always be ended positively and successfully
In the field of business, consumers are the most important people and call center representatives need to know how to effectively handle calls from the point of receiving, the conversation process and how to end positively. It is when these phone manners are mastered that there can be a difference between agents and answering machines or software.
Readers can also read: Qualities of a Good Call Center Agent
