Poor communication skills

Poor communication skills

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Poor communication skills

Great communication skills are a must for call center employees who deal with customer issues all day long.  Specially with internal pressure to address customer concerns quickly and effectively, reps must work diligently to correct any poor communication skills.  Otherwise, their performance will suffer. 

While poor communication skills can describe a wide variety of behaviors and habits, we’ll use this opportunity to highlight four of the most obvious signs that poor communication skills are getting in the way of a job well done.  More specifically, reps with poor communication skills tend to assume they know calls are about the before the customer speaks, jump in to help too soon, react to key words and try to win the conversation.

Know what the calls are about 

Reps with poor communication skills allow the monotony of call center work to get the best of them.  They assume that because a large number of calls tends to sound the same, every call is the same.  This of course is not only untrue, it can cause the interaction to drag on unnecessarily as the rep wastes time addressing irrelevant issues and is eventually forced to address the real reason for the call.

In order to avoid falling into the monotony trap and assuming all calls are the same, reps should wait a few seconds before replying to a customer’s concern.  While this may add a few seconds to the initial part of the call, this practice will save several minutes by giving the rep a solid understanding of the calls and the issues to be handled. 

Jumping in to help too soon

Along the same lines of assuming they know what calls are about, reps with poor communication skills tend to offer their help too soon into the conversation.  While providing assistance to the customer is the whole point of a reps existence, timing is a crucial element in any interaction.  People want to be heard and then be helped.  As customer service professionals, agents must deal first with emotions and then with logic.  Interrupting a customer who has not yet vented all his/her frustration (and they will be frustrated if the called customer service), will make for a protracted and usually painful conversation.  

Instead of offering a great solution right away, allow the customer a reasonable time to get the emotions out of the way.  Then, become the hero of the hour, by being able to solve the customer’s problem.

Reacting to key words

Agents who have poor communication skills, allow specific words to guide their reactions and draw their focus.  The result is normally an undue emphasis on issues that are of little importance, as well as increased frustration for callers with problems.  It is important to point out that certain key words of phrases can give clues as to the customer’s concerns; however, putting too much weight on the words is problematic.

Since customers do not have the benefit of working at the call center they have contacted, they do not realize that words that mean one thing in the pubic domain, may have a completely different context in the call center environment.  Reps with poor communication skills may forget this fact and may immediately fall back to a redefined response if they hear word a key word.  Instead, reps should ask confirming and follow up questions to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

Wining the conversation

The undisputed fact is that customer calls can get very heated.  Nevertheless, the answering agent, as a professional, must keep the conversation on track and pointed toward a beneficial resolution.  Reps with Poor communication skills, and even bad attitudes, may get drawn into the emotional side of the interaction and may want to “win’ the discussion.  Unfortunately, when the customer loses, so does the company.  

Instead of trying to be right and win a specific discussion, agents to should work to partner with callers so that the interaction is productive.  Only good communicators are able to defuse difficult situations and convey a helpful demeanor.  Every agent should strive to become such a communicator as those are the folks who move ahead in the call center.

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