When you provide most of your customer service over the telephone, it’s important to make sure you give a friendly and professional service. The great thing is that it’s such an easy thing to do.
Here are a couple of the best, easiest and well proven ways to make sure your customers walk away from telephone interactions with a dose of the warm and fuzzies.
Smile before you answer
In fact, smile before you even reach for the phone. It doesn’t matter if you’re having a grumpy day and it doesn’t matter if the last customer was less than pleasant to deal with. Smiling before you answer the phone will make you sound happy, and in most cases it lifts your mood as well. It will add warmth to your voice and the caller will “hear” the smile and be more receptive to what you have to say.
Focus on the call
Don’t work on other things, don’t answer your emails or surf the web or play games or whatever you do to waste time while you talk. It sounds obvious, but it’s too easy to get into the habit of doing a quick email check, or even totally zoning out when someone is waffling on. Apart from the fact that you may miss something important, your customers will notice the lack of attention.
Practise active listening
Because you only have verbal cues in a telephone conversation – it’s even more important to practise active listening. In a face to face conversation you have nonverbal cues that help you understand exactly what a customer is talking about. People tend to spell things out more clearly when they’re writing them down in either an email or letter. In fact, whenever you’re dealing with something detailed or important you should be sending a confirmation email summarizing the conversation.
Manners matter
Some times I feel like a bit of a broken record going on and on with a “manners matter mantra”. But good manners are so easy and make an enormous difference. And I really am talking about little things here. When you answer a call, have a greeting in there somewhere – not just a blunt “XYZ Company”. When you finish the call, have a goodbye in there as well as a closing statement. If you’re asking the customer to do something for you – a please will always go down a treat.
Seriously, this is simple stuff… And sometimes it is hard to remember to smile when you’ve had a couple of bad calls in a row, and sometimes you really need to finish the typing or get a request that’s so simple it doesn’t need any confirmation, and sometimes you get a customer who really doesn’t warrant manners – but if you can remember, if you do make the effort, you’ll find the response from the customers is noticeable.
So what’s your favourite telephone tip? Please share it in the comments.
