Controlling phone calls; getting your average handle time down, known as AHT, comes down to emotional intelligence. You must understand your customer’s experience and relay that understanding to them. Knowing how they feel and how they see things is crucial.
Why Calls Get Beyond Your Control
When customers feel like you don’t understand their issue, they’ll over-explain and vent unnecessarily. You probably understand them and are already working on the next steps. But if your customers don’t feel you get it, it will be harder for you to manage the call. So, you must make customers feel heard and understood.
The 5 Most Underutilized Soft Skills
Five crucial soft skills validate customers and help you drive conversations forward and to closure. With these five skills, you’ll have more control over calls and chats. Most people don’t use the skills that give them the most power.
So, what are the top five underutilized soft skills for contact center agents? Glad you asked! These are the soft skills most underutilized:
Urgency
Agreeability
Empathy
Active Listening
Recap
Let’s dive into each skill.
Urgency
Acting promptly and efficiently is what urgency is all about. Here’s how it might sound. “I’m sorry you’ve had such a frustrating experience. I aim to resolve this issue on this call. The first thing I need is ______.”
When you demonstrate urgency, customers are at ease and talk less because they know you are making things happen.
Agreeability
The characteristics of agreeableness include cooperation, politeness, kindness, and friendliness. A person with high agreeableness is likely to be empathic, an excellent listener, a collaborator, and better at resolving conflict. An agreeable person might say, “I see your point,” or “If I were in your shoes, I’d feel the same way.”
Empathy
The goal of empathy is to be completely aware of the person’s experience, how they feel, and how they see things. Empathy makes customers feel heard. You establish trust. Empathy gives you the power to influence the conversation and move it forward. When you say something like, “I realize how frustrating this must have been for you,” you’re conveying empathy, gaining trust, and can influence the conversation.
Active Listening
Recent research shows active listening is used only three times out of every 100 calls in the healthcare industry, for example. Imagine what your relationship would be like if your partner, child, or boss only listened to you 0.03% of the time!
What active listening looks like:
Verbal cues, “Um-hm,” or “I see.”
Not interrupting
Yielding in conversation and letting the customer finish.
Being fully present in the moment.
Recap
The Comprehensive Recap is for a call, what the FAQ section is for a website. It redirects the customer intuitively, giving them what they need. The Comprehensive Recap helps you control calls by answering customers’ questions before they can ask them and guiding them to the next steps.
A successful recap is determining the questions your customers ask in the last seconds of a call and proactively answering those questions before the customer has a chance to ask them. This focus will shave seconds, if not minutes, off your talk time!
Conclusion
When you focus on the top 5 most underutilized soft skills, you’ll get your average handle time down and decrease stress! For more help with conversation control, check out my De-escalation Academy.