Great Customer Service on the Telephone

Kristin Anderson

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780814415801
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

A thorough, quick-reading guide that shows anyone who uses the phone how to treat it as a service tool that directly impacts on company profits.

First impressions are often lasting impressions. How customers are treated on the phone can quickly turn them into either an ex-customer or a customer for life.

In this book, you will be able to double your effectiveness when you learn how to:

• handle irate customers
• end those "endless" calls
• take meaningful messages
• handle conference calls and transfer calls
• screen calls and ask focused questions
• use the phone during emergencies
• improve your voice effectiveness

With worksheets, checklists, and fill-in forms, Great Customer Service on the Telephone will inspire fabulous phone service.

PART	I MANAGING THE MEDIUM

Dick Tracy can do it. So can George Jetson. But for the rest of us, combining visual images and telephone talk is still fiction. The telephone medium, by its very nature, limits and distorts communication. The physical apparatus of the telephone serves as a filter for everything you want to communicate to your caller and for everything your caller wants to communicate to you. When it isn’t managed, that “filter” can—and will—work against you. It’s no wonder that the real message can be so easily lost or garbled when you can’t deliver it in person!

You can manage the telephone medium so that it is a powerful and positive tool that works for you. You manage it first by understanding it—what it does, and what it keeps you from doing. Then, you use the most effective techniques and tactics for taking messages, transferring calls, juggling lines, and taking advantage of the technology.

You probably won’t use a Dick Tracy watch or a Jetson’s View Phone, at least not in this decade. But you don’t need one. By using the techniques given in this section, the power of communicating with far-off voices (the original Greek meaning of telephone) will be yours.

CHAPTER 1

YOU CAN BE A MIND READER

Whether your company makes cars, sells insurance, repairs air conditioners, or heals the sick; whether your customers are young or old, rich or poor, or men or women—you can know for certain what your customers expect. When it comes to calling your company on the phone, customers expect you to do two things:

1. Show respect.
2. Have a good reason for being on the other end of the line.

Showing respect means dealing with all calls in a pleasant and courteous way. You show through your voice and your manner that you are genuinely pleased to be having the conversation (even when the customer is complaining or saying “no” to your product offering!). Respect also means that you are not using the telephone as a weapon, a way to cheat or mislead the customer with “too good to be true” offers and services—which, of course, you would never do.

Having a good reason for being on the line means that there is a positive purpose in the call. If you’re picking up the phone, it means that you will assist the caller in whatever way possible. You have a good reason even if all you can do at that moment is take a complete and accurate phone message and pass it on to the appropriate person. If you are placing the call, a good reason means that you are acting in good faith upon the belief that what you have to say will be beneficial to or of interest to the person you are calling.

GETTING INSIDE YOUR CUSTOMER’S HEAD

A funny thing happens when you pick up a ringing phone. To the caller, you become your company. It doesn’t matter if you’re the night janitor or the CEO. To the caller, you are the company.

During each call, you have an opportunity to create for your customer a positive memory of your organization—a memory of “the people with the friendly voices,” or “the folks who have all the answers,” or “the man who cared about my problem,” or “the woman who helped me understand and get just what I needed.”

To create positive memories, you must manage the five ways customers evaluate your telephone contact with them. These five keys, identified by Texas A&M researcher Dr. Leonard Berry and his colleagues, encapsulate everything your customer judges when he or she comes into contact with you:

1. Reliability. The ability to provide what was promised, dependably and accurately.
2. Responsiveness. The willingness to help customers promptly.
3. Assurance. The knowledge and courtesy you show to customers, and your ability to convey trust, competence, and confidence.
4. Empathy. The degree of caring and individual attention you show your customers.
5. Tangibles. The physical facilities and equipment, and your own and others’ appearance. (Think this one doesn’t belong? Consider how poor telephone equipment sounds over the phone lines, and how often customers and coworkers see you when you’re talking on the telephone.)

The next time you hang up after a call to a bank or a restaurant or a hairdresser or a doctor’s office, pause a moment and ask yourself two questions:

1. What memory did the voice on the other end of the line create for me?
2. Is this a memory I would want to create for my customers?

Use the worksheet below to list at least one way you demonstrate each factor when you use the telephone. For example, next to “Reliability” you might write “I return all phone messages within two hours or before 9:00 A.M. the following business morning.”

Post the list of the Berry factors near your phone to remind yourself of ways you transmit positive memories through the telephone lines.

CHAPTER 2

THE CHALLENGE OF TELEPHONE COMMUNICATION

One of the most important aspects of your day-to-day interactions with customers and coworkers, friends and family, is your nonverbal communication—the things you don’t say. The way you stand or move, the clothes you wear, the gestures you make, everything that you don’t say sends a far stronger message than the actual words you use and even the way you use those words.

Given the subtlety and importance of nonverbal communication, it’s a wonder we can communicate over the telephone at all! And yet, for most businesses the telephone is a major lifeline—often the number one medium of communication. The telephone compresses time and space. It allows you to communicate over long distances not possible with face-to-face communication. The telephone has an immediacy that the mail cannot rival. And it allows interaction in a way not possible through broadcast television or radio.

WHEN WE COMMUNICATE FACE-TO-FACE The words we choose account for 7 percent of our message’s impact, our vocal quality accounts for 38 percent of our message’s impact, and our nonverbals account for 55 percent of our sage’s impact.

—ALBERT MEHRABIAN, Nonverbal Communication

THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS

Whether you are communicating face-to-face or via the telephone, the communication process itself remains the same. Figure 1 illustrates the six elements involved in every communication act: (1) the sender, (2) the channel of communication, (3) the receiver, (4) feedback, (5) the physical environment, and (6) the sender and receiver’s psychological environment.

Figure 1. The communication process.

It is important to understand each of the six communication elements and how they interact:

Sender	The person with a message to communicate.
Channel of Communication, or Medium	The way the message will travel between sender and receiver.
Receiver	The person who hears the message and interprets its meaning.
Feedback	The way the receiver indicates that the message has been heard and understood—or that it is confusing or annoying. The receiver’s response to the sender.
Physical Environment	What surrounds the entire communication process. It includes your work space and the physical place where your customer is and whether those places are warm or cold, noisy or quiet, and so on.
Psychological Environment	What both sender and receiver operate within, made up of their past experiences, fears and expectations, assumptions and prejudices. It affects how the sender shapes the message and how the receiver interprets it.

Whether you are sender or receiver during a phone conversation, you have 100 percent of the responsibility to make sure that the message is understood correctly. As sender, you must present your message in the way it will be best understood by the receiver. As receiver, you must provide feedback either by asking for clarification or acknowledging understanding.

When you communicate your message via the telephone, you have to craft it more carefully than when you communicate face-to-face. Effective phone communication is short and to the point, while remaining cordial. It includes requests for feedback as well as silent time to allow that feedback to be communicated.

The physical apparatus of the telephone can distort the sound of your voice and make your words difficult to understand. In addition, the telephone eliminates nonverbal communication, so the importance of verbal communication skills—including the way you manage subverbals such as “uh huh” and “hmmm” and other sounds you make to indicate you are listening—is increased.

One of the reasons that nonverbal communication is so powerful is that it gives us clues about a person’s psychological environment. If you call a woman customer “Honey” in a face-to-face situation, and you see her eyes narrow and her face get red, it’s a pretty clear indication that you’ve offended her. And after you see that, you have a chance to make things right. But when you talk on the telephone, when such clues are lacking, it is critically important that you know your caller’s “hot buttons” before you place the call, or at least that you are extra sensitive to the way your message may be interpreted or misinterpreted by the person on the other end of the line.

Unlike face-to-face communication, telephone communication means that you and the caller will be in different physical environments. Your message may compete with distractions beyond your control—office noise, interruptions, uncomfortable temperature, or a large window overlooking a lake where your customer would rather be! Listen for background noise clues. They may prompt you to ask, “Is now a good time for our phone call?” or “Am I speaking loud enough?” When you compete with outside distractions, your telephone message has to be interesting to your caller and straight to the point.

CHAPTER 3

THERE’S A RINGING IN MY EARS!

You know what it feels like. You place a call and the telephone rings once, twice, three times, four times, six times, eight times. You wonder if you’ve dialed the wrong number or whether you’ve accidentally called Mars—and no one is home. Or, maybe the person you’re calling is suffering an elbow malady that prevents him or her from picking up the phone. Or perhaps today is a new federal holiday and your company is the only one open for business.

Finally, you give up, abandon your attempt. You become yet another customer lost to an unanswered telephone.

It’s precisely because of this all too frequent scenario that many companies have instituted a policy of “answer by the third ring.” By setting a standard and measuring performance against it, companies hope they can eliminate a lot of customer frustration—and gain increased customer satisfaction.

Is there something magical about three rings? No. In fact, studies show that customers care more that their call is eventually answered by someone who can a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Managing the Medium
• Part II. Managing Your Call
• Part III. Managing Yourself
• Appendix A: Placing an International Call
• Appendix B: North American Area Codes
• Appendix C: Time Zone Map
• Appendix D: Verbal Spelling Guide