When customers experience issues with a product or detect an issue with billing, one of their first moves will be to give your business a call to sort it out. Now, its entirely possible that they will approach this situation with a bit of frustration, but your team should have a plan in place to keep the situation calm and defused. Our best advice is to focus on developing emotional intelligence and applying it to those more tense conversations. Here are a few tips to help you do just that!
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions to reduce stress, communicate effectively, overcome challenges, and defuse conflicts.
Using Emotional Intelligence When Interacting with Customers
- Determine Customer Needs. Any customer who decides to call your business could have a variety of reasons for doing so. They may be excited, confused, or even angry. Categorizing these feelings will allow your team to react to them appropriately. To be sure you have an accurate assessment of their needs, you can listen to their message and then summarize it back to them (and provide an apology, if applicable), before actually moving to address their needs.
- Create a Streamlined Interaction Process. It’s important to be proactive and try to create a streamlined process for customers trying to reach your business.If a customer is trying to reach you with a complaint, you can imagine a hold line or automated menu navigation system would only add to their frustration. FAQs, chatbots, and call answering services can each reduce wait times for your customers.
- Offer a Personal Touch. Your team may have a general script to follow when handling customer calls, but it’s important to remember than no two individuals are completely alike, so your approach may need to vary. By no means should the script be abandoned entirely. Rather, it should be used as a guide to navigate through a conversation. This method leaves a little room for your team to show they really care about their customer, which is how genuine relationships are formed. For example, sometimes it’s worth acknowledging the inconvenience a customer has endured as a means to empathize with their situation, and them moving forward and delivering a fix.
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