There are four communication styles in Robert and Dorothy Bolton’s communication styles model, each with its own specialties, stress reaction, and learning preferences.

Looking at the table below, which of these lists best describes you?

If your first reaction is that you fit into more than one list, that can be true. Yes, everyone is unique in their own way so it’s hard to put yourself in “one box.” But the Boltons have discovered that there are similarities in the way people communicate, so everyone has a dominant style. Let’s look at each style in more detail:

• The words in the upper left corner describe an amiable. Amiables are relationship-oriented, specialize in listening and being supportive, and acquiesce when stressed.
• The words in the upper right corner describe an expressive. Expressives are social-oriented, specialize in making personal connections and having a lot of energy, and attack when stressed.
• The words in the lower left corner describe an analytic. Analytics are process-oriented, specialize in fact-finding and methodical processes, and avoid when stressed.
• Lastly, the words in the lower right corner describe a driver. Drivers are results-oriented, specialize in problem-solving and decision-making, and autocrat when stressed.

Once you have determined your dominant style, it’s crucial to understand how to flex to others to ensure you are communicating effectively based on their characteristics. By understanding my style, I gained self-awareness, allowing me to have more productive conversations in and outside of the workplace. For example, I learned that as an expressive, I can go off on a tangent when talking, which another expressive might enjoy; however, I should try to stick to the point if I’m communicating with an analytic because they don’t like to veer from the facts.

I am also more aware of the communication styles of others. Now, I catch myself trying to diagnose the communication styles of those around me in my personal and professional life. I can’t help but think how useful learning this skill sooner would have been. It can be beneficial during group projects in school, social settings, or conflicts with my friends and family.

It’s been eye-opening to hear how representatives practice self-awareness in our Effortless Experience Capabilities Builder sessions. By knowing their own style and being able to diagnose the customer’s style, they can improve communications by flexing to better meet the needs of the customer. In my first few months, I heard representatives reflect on how conversations with some challenging customers could have gone differently and what they are doing now to enhance the customer experience. A common realization among representatives is that driver customers want to get straight to the point; whereas, amiables are likely to start an interaction by describing the details of their day and why they are reaching out.

Understanding communication styles is so important, it is the first skill we teach representatives because it sets the tone for the rest of the conversation. Giving them the tools to identify communication styles through verbal and even nonverbal cues ensures they can effectively interact with customers to deliver a low-effort experience.

The post Identifying communication styles for better self-awareness and understanding appeared first on Challenger Inc.

Think about this in a customer service interaction: An encounter with a distracted representative will inevitably lead to frustration and a high effort experience for customers. How do we reinforce active listening on our teams to ensure effortless experiences for our customers?

Effortless Experience’s findings on active listening

Our Effortless Experience team regularly listens to customer service interactions where we hear representatives catch a key phrase or a few words and jump into action. When this happens, representatives tend to:

• Interrupt with a response as soon as the customer takes a pause
• Believe they are right, and the customer is wrong
• Make incorrect assumptions about what the customer needs

Where customer frustration kicks in

When representatives spring into action, they are likely trying to get off the phone quicker and give their solution to the customers before they have had a chance to fully explain their problem. While it is easy for the representative to have this expectation when they see the same issue three or four times that day, they need to be aware that solutions are not a one size fits all. What works for one customer may not work for another.

Promoting active listening

While reps should always be listening, active listening is making the conscious effort to lean in and shut out all disruptions—really be attentive to what the customer is saying. It is more than just a soft skill. If a representative is attentive, it ensures they are engaged in a two-way conversation, rather than passively taking in what the customer is saying.

Active listening lays a foundation for any successful customer service interaction. By committing their full attention to an interaction, representatives keep the focus on the customer experience, which reduces the chances of miscommunications, while also making the client feel valued and heard.

Attentiveness is the key to active listening

How can representatives actively listen and be attentive to customers?

1. Listen and Confirm: Representatives need to listen without formulating an immediate response. By using simple phrases like “Okay” or “I understand” reps can confirm with customers they are actively listening before confirming their issue. Remember, representatives cannot listen if they are speaking.
2. Seek Clarification: Oftentimes, representatives are not entirely sure why a customer is contacting the company. This may lead to incorrect assumptions about both the problem and the solution. To prevent this, representatives need to ask clarifying questions. The upfront time spent here will reduce customer frustration and time later in the process.
3. Paraphrase and Probe: Customers want to feel heard. To accomplish this, customer service representatives should pause, reflect, and ask questions. Representatives should repeat and paraphrase what a customer says to demonstrate care and understanding. This reduces frustration and lets the representative develop a clearer understanding of the problem. Responses such as “What I’m hearing is” or “Let me gather all this information correctly” build rapport.

Increasing customer loyalty through the service experience

We have all experienced interactions with customer service representatives who simply follow a script and lack interest in solving issues. These interactions erode trust and confidence. Customers want candid and human-driven experiences. Remember: If your current customers encounter representatives who seem disinterested or distracted, they can—and will—go elsewhere.

The post Active listening is more than just a soft skill appeared first on Challenger Inc.

The post Assessing the Impact of an Effortless Experience appeared first on Challenger Inc.

The post What Your Customers Want . . . TODAY appeared first on Challenger Inc.

The post Crawl, Walk, Run Customer Service appeared first on Challenger Inc.

In Gartner’s recent 2021 Customer Service Rep Role and Experience Survey, data shows that only one in three reps are actually engaged; the remaining reps are neutral or disengaged.

Clearly, service organizations need to determine how they are going to keep their engagement up, especially because disengaged reps are likely to turn over.  According to Gartner, disengaged reps are 84% more likely to look for a new job than engaged reps, and even neutral reps are 43% more likely to engage in job-seeking behaviors.  The Great Resignation is among us and it’s impacting customer service companies around the globe. If two-thirds of your rep workforce are either disengaged or neutral about their job, you are in serious trouble. It can be extremely costly when the industry average cost of a rep attiring from the organization is over $14,000.

One of the findings in Gartner’s latest study is that the level of engagement of reps is impacted by their work environment. And in 2021, we’re not talking directly about impacts of the COVID pandemic or the shift to working from home. We’re talking about reps’ surroundings pertaining to the support they receive, both in knowledge and well-being, and roles and goals reps are asked to obtain.

At Challenger, what we know is that investing in your people is a powerful way to build engagement and foster rep CQ.  CQ specifically stands for Control Quotient, which is the rep’s ability to exercise ownership over their day-to-day work and remain in control of themselves in stressful situations.

Reps with high CQ are more adaptable, engaged, and resilient to the natural pressures of the job, with lower risk of burnout. These reps also have better overall performance, as well as increased discretionary effort (willingness to work harder) and intent to stay.  Yet candidly, call centers have a remarkable ability to crush reps’ natural levels of CQ with rigid checklists, call flows, scripting, and readerboards looming overhead with 40 calls waiting in the queue.

So how do organizations build high CQ among their rep population?  Glad you asked. Our analysis found that there are three key drivers of high CQ workplace environments:

Two of the actions leadership can take to achieve these goals are the backbone of our Effortless Experience offerings:

1. providing reps with the flexibility to exercise their own judgment and
2. providing actionable service goals

The best way to allow for both things to happen is to not restrict reps by such rigid QA checklists or scripts or call flows in their customer interactions. Empowerment often is a term that gets tossed around – and empowering your reps is giving them the right toolkit, but leaving the discretion in their hands as far as how they deploy these tools.  And furthermore, you need to ensure the tools in the toolkit become the service goals that everyone is working toward in a collaborative manner.  How so?  By backing it up with a quality and coaching program that reinforces these skills or behaviors, rather than a micro-managey checklist.

Our Effortless Experience training programs enable organizations to improve service quality by providing agents with the Low-Effort tools they need to feel confident handling customers with complex demands and emotional needs. If you’re looking to keep up with the changing world, let us know.

 

The post How to avoid the Great Resignation with Good Engagement appeared first on Challenger Inc.

Without emotion from the reps, too often this is what interactions sound like:

Rep: “Good afternoon, thank you for contacting Company X, how may I help you today?”

Customer: “Hi, I’m hoping you can help, my recent online order (a glass vase) just arrived, and when I reached into the box, I cut my hand because the vase broke in the delivery.”

Rep: “What’s your order number?”

If I’m the customer above (and yes, this is a real interaction), I’m ending this conversation pretty quickly because they clearly do not care about me and likely will not help me.

So how can reps connect more with their customers?

One common way organizations encourage this more “human connection” is by asking reps to show empathy to customers. Everyone wants their reps to put him or herself in the customer’s shoes. However, improperly enforcing the use of empathy can cause reps to sometimes use scripting that sounds disingenuous because the customer’s context is not taken into account. This can be an unintended consequence of bad enforcement because reps will say certain phrases for performative reasons knowing it is safe to include it in the interaction. Although the whole point is to reduce the robotic nature of interactions, telling reps to show more empathy without properly teaching its use leads them to solely think about WHAT they are about to say to customers instead of HOW to personalize the interaction. Furthermore, with strict average handle time guidelines and rigid KPI scorecards at many organizations, reps fear being more human will open Pandora’s box and result in them losing control of the interaction.

Using inauthentic or empty statements like “I’m on your side,” “I’m sorry,” or “That must be frustrating” to try to sound empathetic (without actually being empathetic or channeling the customer’s context) is how reps miss the mark. Without being able to understand where customers are coming from and see why they are frustrated, reps can come across as insincere. Customers are often primed to think that reps care more about policies than them as people, so they can be cynical about statements like “I hear you” or “I’m here to help you.” Reps should try to connect with what the customer is thinking or feeling and reflect that back (as they might if a friend or family member was calling). If empathy is not authentic, customers will see right through it.

On the other hand, without also understanding empathy’s boundaries (and that it means something different to everyone), empathy can be misused, and worse yet, over-used in customer interactions.

You may be wondering; how can you really take empathy too far?

Let’s take a look.

Rep: “Good afternoon, thank you for contacting Company X, how may I help you today?”

Customer: “Hi, I’m hoping you can help, my recent online order (a glass vase) just arrived, and when I reached into the box, I cut my hand because the vase broke in the delivery.”

Rep: “I am so happy you are contacting us about this. I am so sorry this happened to you. Is your hand alright? You must be in so much pain! I cannot believe the vase broke in the delivery process. You must be so annoyed with our company. What’s your order number?”

If I’m the customer above, I am annoyed. There is too much emotion from the rep, and I do not appreciate the rep trying to feel for me. I just want to say how I feel and explain what happened, so they can send me a new one and fix their process to ensure this does not happen again.

When reps over-use empathy in interactions, it can sound patronizing to the customer and insincere and inauthentic. This is why getting empathy right is so important. It must be taught how and when to use it. Within our Effortless Experience Capabilities Builder program at Challenger, empathy is taught as one of five attributes of being an advocate for customers. Since empathy is not the only way to demonstrate advocacy, the way we teach it reduces risk that reps will over-use or use it improperly/insincerely. Our program helps provide some nuance that most organizations are missing today when they simply train their reps on “empathy.”

The post What is the most over-used customer service skill? appeared first on Challenger Inc.

There is no statistical impact on customer effort when:

• A rep showed concern
• A rep was non-scripted
• A rep understood the customer
• A rep listened well

To be clear, if your reps are not showing concern or not listening well, it’s likely going to be a pretty poor experience for your customers. What we are saying here is that these types of “soft skills” are no longer enough—they are necessary but insufficient. Your customers expect these things, but they also expect a lot more.

And this may sound familiar but bears repeating as we grapple with the post-COVID realities… times are hard for your customers. Let’s put ourselves in their shoes. They are working from home, multi-tasking, and tired. We also know that when something goes wrong, and it always does, your team is taking the call. How should your reps handle the call? Sure, showing concern and listening well is important, but it’s not what’s needed to move the needle on effort reduction.

What your customer needs is a consultant. As one customer service leader (who is in the minority, not simply focused on soft skills) put it, “We see our best reps really taking control of the conversation—they anticipate moments when the customer is likely to have a negative reaction, and do their best to get ahead of it.”

So how do we help customers get what they need, while also empowering reps to take control and actually resolve issues? How can reps behave like consultants? It’s demonstrating advocacy, which can take many shapes depending on the customer or the issue at hand.

Let’s take a look at how this plays out. As we did our research to better understand what drives customer effort, we conducted experiments to test customer reactions when there is a typical service response and when a low-effort skill is displayed. Here, we’ll examine the advocacy experiment.

Imagine you are the customer, and you have a new bike. Unfortunately, your new bike has an issue with its break cable. When you contact customer service, the rep says:

Rep Response A: “It’s really difficult to tell what’s happening over the phone. You should just bring it into one of our certified repair shops to have it looked at.”

Now imagine the rep handled it like this:

Rep Response B: “I know that can be frustrating, so I’ll definitely pass your feedback onto our engineering team. Okay, let me check to see if other customers have had a similar issue with that bike model—that should tell us if it’s a repair issue or it if it just requires a break-in period. Okay, I’m not seeing many instances of customers having the same issue, so I’d recommend bringing it back to the shop and having them take a look at it, especially since it’s still under warranty.”

It’s the same answer from both reps—you are going to have to bring that bike into the shop—but the difference is the degree of advocacy shown. Did you notice how that second rep indicates what they are going to do (pass along the feedback) and also how they make a value-based recommendation (“what I’d recommend,” “especially since it’s under warranty”)? THAT is what being a consultant looks like in action.

The difference may seem small, but the impact on the customer experience is dramatic. Remember, customer effort is in the eye of the beholder. Even though in both situations, the actual effort of taking the bike to the shop is high, one of these interactions has the perception of much, much lower customer effort.

This skill, advocacy, needs to be taught early. It’s hard to have a successful customer service exchange (one that is reducing customer effort) if the rep isn’t making a connection with your customer right from the start. And while simple phrases like “I’m going to take care of this for you” or “We’re going to figure this out together” can go a long way and sets the stage for the remainder of the call, it’s also important to help your reps see that there are frequently many ways to demonstrate the behaviors you’re asking them to perform. In our approach to teaching your reps how to deliver low-effort customer service, we emphasize the key components of a skill without dishing out a specific script or call flow that mandates a single right way to, in this case, be an advocate for the customer. Service interactions are as dynamic as the customers we are helping, so why would we expect them to be anything other than dynamic conversations?

The post When seeking support, your customers need a consultant appeared first on Challenger Inc.

An immediate reaction to the lack of change success might be to think that employees simply don’t have the willingness or capability to drive successful change. However, in a recent change readiness survey, 64% of employees were shown to have at least a baseline level of effectiveness in most skills required to engage in change.

If it’s not our people who lack the ability to successfully change, we need to determine if the way the organization is implementing change is the problem. Are they telling their employees how to change or are they involving them in the planning? When it comes down to it, do they have employee buy-in?

If they aren’t using their employees to strategize, they are likely engaging in top-down change, and not in open source change. Open source change uses employees to influence and improve change using three key elements:

• Leaders proactively include employees in change strategy decisions
• Employees own implementation planning
• Communication focuses on talking instead of telling
• From the same change readiness survey, research shows open source strategies can increase the probability of change success from 34% to 58%, increase employee engagement, and decrease the number of change resistors within the organization.

One of the most effective approaches for building momentum and decreasing the number of change resistors in open source change is to communicate and sustain it by sharing application stories that highlight early successes.

Think about it – when we see others like us doing something, we’re more likely to follow in suit. In our Effortless Experience product offerings, we work closely with service organizations to showcase “social proof” on all levels. In our rep and supervisor programs, participants develop a peer network in the classroom and throughout reinforcement activities to make participants’ efforts visible to each other. Visibility is a big theme when it comes to reinforcing behavior and to encourage participants to follow through and gain what the program has to offer.

With the social proof we’ve gathered, we present upwards to leadership as well. Highlighting success can validate the need for the change across the organization and allows leaders to understand the extent to which individuals in an organization possess the change capabilities to help make effective decisions.

In contrast, leaders need to be aware of the barriers to change within their organization to remove friction that chips away at the momentum. Not only do we talk through common barriers we hear from organizations implementing our program, but also we encourage leaders to uncover specific barriers we may not be aware of. This exercise enables effective change management because leaders walk away with tangible next steps to remove these barriers to achieve change success. In addition, open source change conversations help surface additional barriers that may not have been readily apparent to leadership. If you want to know where behavior change it going to fail, you should really be asking the people who are supposed to implement the change (in this case, the frontline).

So the next time you’re looking to implement change within your organization, whether it’s big or small, consider using an open source change strategy that includes your employees from the beginning. And remember to continue their involvement throughout the entire change, highlighting their success and listening to what may prevent them from changing.

The post Creating momentum and reducing friction to motivate organizational change appeared first on Challenger Inc.

1. Referring to Performance Management as Coaching

Performance management is driving employee conduct through metrics. For example, having a conversation because your absenteeism is high, is performance management not coaching. To  put someone on a PIP is performance management, not coaching.

Coaching is partnering with your staff to improve future employee performance. For example, asking open-ended questions that drive your staff to self-discovery, is coaching. Having a conversation about development areas that address specific behaviors unique to that person, is coaching. The danger of calling everything “coaching” is that it can start to have a negative connotation and “getting coached” feels punitive.  It’s also confusing to call everything you do “coaching.”

2. Failure to Root Cause Behaviors

I’m going to bet that most supervisors have not used the words root, cause, or analysis in the same sentence when discussing development of their teams. However, completing a root cause analysis is a critical step in identifying the source of many performance challenges. The metric is not enough—there could be several reasons for the outcome you are seeing.

If Sally has a low CES, you need to ask WHY her score is low and you need to ask WHY at least 5 times. I know you’re thinking, I can’t afford to spend that much time doing all of that? And my response to that is, you can’t afford not to. Sally’s low CES could be related to not being properly trained on a process, not feeling empowered to provide solutions to her customers and over relying on company policy, or a slow computer processor that results in calls taking longer. If you are not root causing, then you risk fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants coaching that—at best—addresses the wrong root cause, and wastes both the coach’s time and that of the employee.  At worst, the coach actively disengages the employee and ultimately hurts their performance.

3. Over Relying on Scheduled Coaching

Did you know that there are 2 types of coaching, scheduled and integrated? Scheduled coaching is an opportunity to level set the development focus for the staff and the supervisor. It’s a time for a “handshake on development” to gain agreement on 2-3 specific development opportunities that should be the focus for the foreseeable future. The problem with scheduled coaching is these conversations don’t happen, and this can result in a 5% negative impact on overall team performance.

Supervisors should be spending 25% of their time in scheduled coaching and the remaining 75% in integrated coaching. Integrated coaching is where the REAL learning happens. It’s the supervisor’s responsibility to find time to observe staff day-to-day and give them feedback on the 2-3 development opportunities agreed on during scheduled coaching. Giving feedback in the moment is very powerful. This feedback can be positive or constructive, but it needs to happen as close to the observable behavior as possible to have the greatest impact.

Now you know that performance management is not coaching, root causing is non-negotiable, and integrated coaching is a key element to coaching. When you weave together these strategies, you create a powerful coaching framework that will drive true performance gains for your organization while also boosting employee engagement.  Talk about a win-win!

The post The 3 Things That Bad Customer Service Coaches Do appeared first on Challenger Inc.