The Right Phone Skills and Procedures – Do You Hold Your Team Members To A High Standard?

Is there a “right way” and a “wrong way” of answering your phone?

• Do your team members know the “right way” to engage your customer via their phone skills and procedures?
• Or is your customer’s phone experience random and dependent upon who answers the phone at the time?
• What happens if someone answers the phone the “wrong way” in your organization?
• Does your “bus” stop and a phone technique training “moment” result?
• Do you have as many telephone answering approaches as you do the number of people answering the phone?

It is critical that your organization have established telephone procedures when it comes to answering the phone.

It is also equally critical that your team members are held accountable in using the required phone procedures consistently.

You can be as tight in controlling what is said and when as you like. However, you must have a standard approach on how to answer the phone effectively and that standard must be known and understood by each team member.

Each team member must be held accountable to answering the phone the correct way. Period.

First, let’s talk about the two ends of the “phone procedures spectrum” that may be expected in terms of how to answer the telephone. There are two approaches as to how tightly you choose to control your customer’s telephone experience with your organization.

The most “controlled” telephone customer service experience would be what we describe as “call scripting” or “tight Touch Points”. The least “controlled” phone customer service experience would be light scripting “waypoints”.

On the “tighter” phone procedures side, answering the phone and engaging your customer via tight “Touch Points” would require call scripting that is very well-defined initially in terms of what exactly is said and how it is said. No, we don’t advocate that every word be scripted for your customer service agents; however certain elements should be highly consistent.

Once the customer reaches certain points in the phone call, the script “opens up” and enables the team member to address the unique needs of the customer appropriately while enabling the team member to be more creative in his or her approach to customer service problem-solving. It’s important that team members know what is “negotiable” and what isn’t in terms of the scripting. This takes persistence and time.

On the “lighter” phone procedures side, answering the phone and engaging your customers via “waypoints” is similar to the thought process in flying an aircraft. Aircraft typically fly from “point-to-point” toward their destination. The wind speed constantly blows the aircraft off course and as the aircraft flies from “waypoint” to “waypoint” it is effectively staying on course as much as possible until it reaches its final destination.

Rather than a tight phone script, each engagement that your team has with the customer must cover certain elements… Some telephone customer service “waypoints” may include:

• The initial greeting
• Use of the customer’s first name several times in the conversation
• The empathy statement – how you acknowledge the frustrations of your customer
• The handoff – how you hand the customer off to another team member
• The problem-solve – how you gather information from the customer to solve their problem

Which phone procedure “approach” should you implement? It depends. Feel free to give us a call and we can help you step by step through your telephone customer service experience opportunities to create a telephone experience that will leave your customer saying “Wow!”