Uncovering the Negative Language in Your Contact Center

Though we may not be fully conscious of it all the time, language has a powerful affect on our moods and preferences. In the call center, it's easy to go wrong with a customer simply by using a poor choice of words. Forward-thinking contact centers call this “negative language.”

Third-party quality monitoring company BPA Quality's Milena Maric recently blogged that negative language is pervasive in contact centers, even if agents and managers don't realize it. In turn, this negative language is damaging customer relationships.

Maric writes, “Walk through a call center and you might hear, 'Unfortunately I can’t send that to you until tomorrow' (which, put into positive is, ‘I will definitely send that to you tomorrow’), or ‘The only one we have is…’ (‘We do have one…’) , or ‘I’m afraid we close at 6 o’clock’ (‘We close at 6 o’clock’).

As you'll hear from the above, negative language has a way of taking neutral or even positive statements and making them sound like disadvantages to the customer. A customer who may never have believed that 6:00 is an early time for a contact center close has now had that idea put into his or her head...by an agent of the company itself.

Unfortunately, fixing negative language can be an enormous chore. It's part of the way many people speak, and changing ingrained behavior is always a tricky prospect. Maric likens it to learning a foreign language.

The first step, of course, is helping agents realize that they're using this negative language and providing incentive for them to change. The second step involves training agents to speak positively by helping agents identify which negative words and phrases they use.

“I avoid the word obviously: it'sa useless filler and sounds patronizing,” one agent told Maric in a training session. She came to this conclusion after listening to two of her calls in a coaching session and realizing she had used the word six times.

“Recognition and insight into own behavior is more than half the battle,” writes Maric. “The only way to get that is by agents frequently hearing their own calls. Not being told, but actually going through that cringe-worthy feeling of listening to one’s own call recordings. No one enjoys it at first. But it isn’t a Pop Idol audition, we’re only concerned with the words here. A good mystery shopping program or QA process will help identify relevant calls for such feedback and coaching.”

The final step, of course, is to practice.

Removing negative language from the call center is an area where call monitoring can be invaluable to companies. Monitors can look for negative language and raise awareness about where it occurs the most often. By understanding under which circumstances (or with which agents) it's most likely to happen, companies can get started early and more directly fix the problem.

Maric offers a caution, however, to not turn negative language into inappropriately positive language. Saying “fantastic!” or “awesome!” to a customer after each sentence he or she utters can be just as annoying as littering up a conversation with negative phrases.

Edited by Blaise McNamee

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