Regarding emotions, it’s best to remain rational and calm when we serve customers over the phone. And staying rational and calm is a choice. I have seen service professionals become upset when they serve customers over the phone.
And my message is that no one can make you become emotionally upset. Instead, people choose to become upset because of either a stressful day or what I call phone call clusters, calls that come in all at one time. And while we can’t control the frequency at which phone calls will come into our operation, we can control our reaction to those events.
And customer service excellence is about gaining control and mastering your vocal skills so that the customer will be influenced by what they hear. You see, when we maintain greater control over our voice, our pace of speech, our vocal tone, our ability to convey value, all of those behaviors enable us to convey a message to the customer that is unmistakable about our belief in our ability and our service company’s ability to get situations resolved. And this is not for the faint of heart because some service professionals become stressed out.
And over the phone, this can activate their fight or flight response, which is our body’s way of protecting itself. This is what stress is. It’s about self-preservation.
And even though customer interactions over the phone are not really threatening in a physical sense, service professionals do sometimes react and their fight or flight response is activated. Over the phone, this is what is called telestress, T-E-L-E dash stress. And telestress is the physical and emotional manifestation of what a customer hears when a phone representative gets stressed out.
By the way, the word telestress is a registered trademark of my company. My company conducted the industry’s first complete study on the physical and emotional manifestations of stress among service professionals. So when we become stressed, that is based on our choice to do so.
And mature professionals make a choice to remain calm to exercise greater self-control, watch their pace of speech, vocal tonality, and select the correct words when they serve customers over the phone. I mentioned fear earlier in this message and it’s a real manifestation of what occurs within service professionals. But the better prepared we are before we begin a phone call, the less fear we will have.
The greater confidence we convey to customers over the phone, the less fear we will have. So what is this boiling down to? This is boiling down to us having the knowledge that enables us to sound like a service professional. Customers will be much more cooperative, they will listen to your suggestions, and they will often say yes if you sound like you know your stuff.
This is not rocket science. Customers that call you need help. They may be upset, they may be stressed out, and in need of a professional.
They’re gonna buy from someone, why not buy from you? And when we can convey that great first impression, when we can build that relationship over the phone, when we enable customers to hear our professionalism, we’re doing things in the correct fashion. Not having any fear about asking a closing question is the most vital part of what is required to convert more calls into sales. So the closing question doesn’t have to be, are you gonna buy from us? The closing question can be something simple such as, do mornings or afternoons work better for you? Or, let’s see how fast we can get someone out there.
May I please have your address? Or, will someone be home this afternoon? Or, we’ve been serving customers in your neighborhood for years. What time works best for you? Now in each one of those question sentences, we were asking to close a sale, but it didn’t sound that way. And when we’ve established a relationship and built rapport with a customer, asking those questions in the manner that I just conveyed is more persuasive and it conveys greater influence.
They will also result in more cooperation from a customer over the phone. Being tenacious, which is a word that just means not giving up, to hang in there and stay with the situation until you are completed. And being tenacious means we commit ourselves to not let callers hang up the phone with us until we have asked all the right questions.
When we ask questions, it puts us in a listening seat and empathy and listening go hand in hand. So this is how listening works. We hear what the customer says, we’re active while we’re hearing, we qualify what the customer says, and part of the active listening is feeding back some of what the customer says so they can hear their own language and we understand what the customer said by verifying the information with the customer.
You hear, you qualify, and you understand. This is what listening entails. When you can master these rudiments and convey a positive first impression, listen well, and ask the right questions, we are on our way towards greater call conversion success.
Getting this done right requires our ability to practice and to role-play with our coworkers. So during your company’s weekly staff meetings, role-play different calls and role-play asking questions the right way. When we role-play, we practice and we apply some of these skills.
And this is what’s vitally important towards making us more successful in converting phone calls into more sales. Service professionals who master the art of influence by maximizing the components of good telephone voice, they become more valuable to their employer and they experience greater career success. So I thank you for making the time to listen to this message on converting phone calls into more sales.