How to Give Exceptional Customer Service Over the Phone

When customers call, how do your people come across? Are they friendly? Empathetic? In control? Do they use language, phrases and intonations that reassure the caller? Are they good listeners—or disinterested sounding boards for complainers and window-shoppers? Imagine what it would do for your organization if every call—incoming and outbound—was handled professionally, courteously, swiftly and with a positive resolution. You’d begin to see increased sales, more repeat business and fewer customer complaints. Even better, your people would go about their work more confident and relaxed—because they’d finally have the proper skills they need to deal with every kind of customer call that comes their way.

Your people will get hard-skills training in how to:

• Stay even-tempered and in-control with five kinds of “tough customers

• Establish genuine rapport with even the most trying callers

• Resolve complaints quickly and confidently to everyone’s satisfaction

• Repair relationships with unhappy customers who otherwise would have been lost forever

You pay plenty for your phone service. It just makes good sense to train the people who use it in the finer points of customer service. If you’re still just "making and taking calls," you’re missing out on countless opportunities to shine in the one area your customers value most: service.

This is high-payoff training that will equip people with:

• Listening skills that can turn a "faceless" conversation into a positive, productive experience for every caller

• Different options when they can’t possibly give call-in customers all they want, expect— or demand

• The confidence to explain unpopular policies, rules and conditions for customers who don’t care or refuse to listen

• Proven ways to give callers the attention they deserve when you’re seriously understaffed

Personal, caring attention over the phone tells your customers they are dealing with an organization that places a high value on an educated, empowered workforce. And that means they are more likely to get their questions answered…their needs met…and their problems solved.

As a result, callers remember and respond by:

• Buying more

• Buying more often

• Referring more friends

• Complaining less

• Returning fewer goods

Your people will learn together that exceptional customer service over the phone creates trust and goodwill that no amount of advertising can buy.

Learn specific telephone communicaitons

• A five step approach to gaining a caller’s confidence…taking control of the situation… and moving to constructive solutions

• Words and phrases that can work wonders to repair damaged customer relations

• How you yourself may be creating unhappy customers—identifying and ending 10 "trigger behaviors"

• When it’s OK to defend, explain or justify - and when it’s not

• Four listening skills to help you tune into your caller’s real needs

How to tame "tought customers" over the phone

Ways your company can shine in your callers' eyes.

• How to use your guarantee to deflect unreasonable demands

• Five "listening loops" - what they are and how they can cut down on the number of disgruntled callers

• How to ensure immediate follow-up on problems and complaints

• Ways to use complaining customers for your company’s quality control

• Cutting the red tape that only irritates already hostile callers

"Every call counts, every caller matters."