How You Speak On The Phone Matters

Are you actually involved in the communication that you deliver when you call a client, or are you just thoughtlessly rattling out what you always say to the people you are calling? Do you see the statistic of your post as number of calls made, or is it actually the number of people that you got in communication with? They may seem, on the surface, to be the same thing, but think about the last robotic sounding call you received from someone and then think about the last good customer service call you received where you felt listened to and got the answers you needed. They were qualitatively different, right?

A good person on the phones is a good advertisement for the company because they communicate the idea that the company cares. This doesn’t just hold for customer service, which often constitutes a repair action, this is also true for your sales team. If your sales team really owns the patter they deliver and have make it their own, then they are not going to be like every other robot treadmill-dialing the so-called warm leads they have grown apathetic about. They might actually be communicating, and people are going to respond to that ; your potential clients will get a good impression of how you operate as a company.

A lot of people who work in call centers work off a script, and there are certain pieces of information that they are required to convey to those they speak to, but there really is a difference between someone who knows what they are talking about compared to someone who is just a glorified parrot. The level of customer service, or the way a salesman has conducted themselves when they are talking to me about a product or service has often been the thing that made me buy something or decide to stay with a company.

Consider Both What You Are Saying And How you Say It

If you are not there in the communication you are delivering then you may as well spam my phone with a pre-recorded message, because it has the same effect. It would be like never changing the copy in an advert that you have run for years – not being engaged in a conversation with those you wish to communicate to. Companies fail because they fail to actually communicate with their customers and their potential customers, and the people on the phones are on the front-line.

You can’t really expect any kind of phone etiquette if the person on the other end of the phone is a zombie from the talking dead. But people do expect etiquette, and with the nature of the world and how business is conducted these days – with a lot of things in your company being outsourced online or via phone, that person who answers the phone or calls out needs to be aware of their role as an ambassador and as a part of your Public Relations department. If they aren’t then they are a liability.

Gatekeepers are important, and you don’t want to be troubled with every call that comes into your company, but there are correct ways to handle people, and you need someone who doesn’t do things by rote, but can actually think on their feet and communicate. If you don’t then you are going to have all your calls handled the same … it will cut your companies communication, and that is going to eventually lead to shrinkage.

Thinking of it in terms of salesman – how are they going to ever really reach a customer if their communication died between the page of the script and the delivery on the phone. That communication never lived for the person using those words, so it is never going to live for the person hearing it. It is a bad advert; it is bad PR. It hurts you and it is going to hurt your income.