Here’s what a good call center script must imbibe for better customer relationships
The customer is king.
If you’re into call center services, they would be your primary source for your daily bread.
This puts a lot of pressure on your conversational and communication skills, either on-call, through emails or whichever channel you choose to communicate them.
Add unprecedented on-call risks to the mix and you have cooked yourself one heck of a storm.
So, is there a way out of this that will keep both you and your customer’s sanity intact?
Yes! A foolproof call center script is the way to go.
What constitutes an effective call center script?
Just like a movie or a play, the purpose of a script in a call center environment is to assist the resource personnel with the storyline of how a certain call should go about. Yes, though the work does leave room for improv, there’s still a lot more than just going word for word and utilizing one’s own experience, common sense and intuition.
Make customer experience a priority
This is an obvious tip but still relevant.
Why? Because on the course of getting your job right, you might forget something that is so vital and basic, hence jeopardizing the system.
I know this sounds a bit harsh, but to a customer, it doesn’t matter if you had a bad day at the office, or if your landlord is breathing down your neck. As long as you give them a positive experience, that’s all that matters in call center.
Positive experience is quite an ambiguous term here.
What it truly means is that you need to sound like you, you need to sound human. It wouldn’t be a surprise to call up a customer care service and find a quintessential scripted robotic response.
Add voice recordings to the mix and you have yourself a glimpse into a possible Skynet invasion in the future. So, long story short, don’t forget that you’re talking to a human on the other end and play your part.
Retain your manners
Scripted or not, there are certain things that go without saying. Like manners and basic call etiquette for example. Without either of these two, you best believe that you wouldn’t be hired as a call center representative at all.
When you answer or receive a call from the customer there is certain protocol you must bear in mind. They are:
- First, offering common courtesy and salutations such as – thank you, please, etc.
- Second, politely asking them to reveal further information or to hold – “How many I help you?”, “May I know what this is regarding”? etc.
Focus on pronunciation
We live in a small world.
Well, at least that’s what communication and the internet have done to us.
Speaking of communication specifically, we are just one call away from speaking to someone on the other half of the world. They might speak and understand our language very differently.
A significant drawback here is that the cultural implications of our phonetics make pronunciation very different from one region to the other.
As a call center representative, you must be very cautious about how you perceive and pronounce words that:
- Don’t hamper the conversation between you and the customer
- Is familiar and easy for the customer to understand what you are saying
If you are only just getting started then, sufficient practice and training in this matter will help you become more proficient in various pronunciations and the most suitable one of a given word.
Emphasize of building relationships
In the customer service or support field (or whatever requires one to call people incessantly) relationships form the crux of their success.
By relationship we mean connections. Networking with the right people who can help you attain your goals quicker.
Your call script should reflect just that. It cannot end with the end of the conversation rather it should also give you a better idea of how you can end calls in a way that helps you hold onto a certain client relationship without much struggle.
How you do this depends entirely on you and your management. While one way might work for a certain group, it might not work for all. The point at the end of the day is that your script should reflect interest on your part in the customer so that they have a motive to call you up again.
Keep it simple
With so many calls you get every day, you’d think keeping you customer interested with lengthy and unrelated questions will help, but contrary to your beliefs, they do a lot of damage.
Your customer doesn’t have a lot of time in his/her hands. In addition to this, they might have a lot of things going on in their day, that they don’t have the patience to listen to anything other than the answers they are looking for.
So, maintain brevity and keep your questions short and simple. Do not drag them and use too many business jargon that would be too hard to perceive.
If at all you do need more information, then just ask them to furnish specific details and leave it at that.
Consider the next tip as a bonus, it doesn’t have anything to do with a script specifically, but on a larger perspective in the call center industry, it will help you quite a lot if you consider it:
Focus on self-help initiatives
On a typical busy day, call service personnel are caught up with multiple calls ringing from every single corner of the office that you can think of.
While one particular set of customers are getting their issues sorted, the other lot is frantically holding onto their phone with a voice recorder going “please press 1 if you *fill in the blank*.
There is absolutely nothing more infuriating for someone who is hell-bent to get through to an expert and has been made to wait for the part 15 minutes.
What does this mean? It means that the word will get out that your customer service, isn’t good enough.
So, to ensure you’re on the right side, add self-help tools and resources that the customers can make use of in the meantime. Or you can also give them something that they can resolve entirely by themselves without the need for a call center executive unless there are exceptions that can be made.
Conclusion
An effective call center script serves as a great partner in putting things into perspective no matter the experience one might have. But yes, it does go a lot farther than manipulating words and phrases to compliment a certain conversation with a customer. The points mentioned above will guide you to do just that and more.
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