Teaching Call Center Agents the Right Skills to Cope with Difficult Transactions

While it’s easy to post a sign in the call center that says that the customer is always right, it’s important to remember that your customer support team is made up of human beings, not signs. Human agents get frustrated and have bad days, and customers – and ultimately the bottom line – pay the price. Any contact center that doesn’t teach its agents some serious coping strategies for bad days and difficult customers is doing the organization a disservice.

Of course, agents can’t be taught to give in to every customer who makes a demand. This scenario would ultimately harm the company as much as accusing customers of being wrong. A middle ground needs to be found that will demonstrate to customers that your company cares about resolving their problems without looking like pushovers.  Zeke Adkins, founder of Luggage Forward, writing for Entrepreneur recently, summed up the conundrum like this: “Customers are not always right. They’re just never wrong.”

“What separates the truly exceptional customer-service organizations from the rest is their ability to successfully bridge any gap between their company’s performance and a client's expectation,” wrote Adkins.

It’s important to teach customer support personnel a series of skills that they need to pull out when they are faced with a customer who is angry, upset or insistent.

Listening skills. Many agents actually set off customers when – rather than really listening to the customer’s problem – they decide in a heartbeat how the problem should be solved and barge on ahead with a solution that may be incorrect for the customer’s situation. The customer gets the message that no one’s listening, and this frustrates and angers him even more. Teach your agents to be quiet, focus and really listen to what the customer is saying before any action is taken.

Empathy. Customers will pay attention to an agent’s tone as much as his or her words. A robotically read, “I’m sorry you’re having that problem” won’t resonate much with customers. A genuine approach that goes off the script in a small way to communicate real empathy can go a long way toward diffusing the customer’s anger.

Be honest. If the company truly made a mistake – shipped a faulty product, overcharged, or failed to take a promised step, for example – admit it. If the company genuinely isn’t at fault or the customer expected something that truly wasn’t promised, communicate that information as well. Adkins says this is the “Customers are not always right” part of the equation.

“If any part of a customer's dissatisfaction doesn't pertain to the service that he or she could have reasonably expected you to provide, be sure to say this,” he wrote.

Focus on making the problem right. Customers will appreciate a resolution that happens on the spot far more than one that takes days or weeks to occur. Empower your agents to bring difficult transactions to a satisfactory conclusion for the customers.

‘If at all possible, try to resolve any issues on the spot,” wrote Adkins. “Train employees to assess the situation and empower them to create a resolution without a manager's approval. If clients can have their problem fixed as soon as possible, everyone will be much happier.”

By providing agents with a measure of autonomy in the process, you’re accomplishing a number of things. You’re ensuring that the customer’s problem will get resolved faster, and you’re empowering the agent to do his or her job more effectively, which is a powerful element of agent retention. While you don’t need to give away the farm to please customers, having a range of options, from discounts on service to facilitating communication between the customer and an authorized dealer, to an easy return shipping process, can make it easier to ensure that customers can leave the transaction feeling like they’re right.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi