How To Improve Your Telephone Listening Skills

As a call center agent, it is extremely important that you possess wonderful telephone listening skills. This skill is one of the most vital aspects required to perform customer service agent duties properly as you will be spending most of the time interacting with the customers via telephone. If you are not comfortable with speaking over the telephone with your customers you cannot survive in the industry. So today we will do a bit of research and try to find out the different ways in which you can improve your telephone listening skills.

Stay Focused:

While interacting with your customers you need to keep the focus on the conversation and try not to get distracted by external noise or other things. Listen to the customers carefully and do not miss out on any important details. Keep your concentration to the highest level so that you forget about everything else and focus on the conversation. This is the first and foremost way to increase customer satisfaction.

And it doesn’t stop there.

While listening to the customers your attitude should be such that you are genuinely interested in listening to the problem and want to solve them as soon as possible. In this way, the customers will feel valued and will develop a good impression about the company. The customer service managers should also ensure that there is no unnecessary talking on the floor so that background noise can be reduced in order to avoid any distraction.

Clarify Important Points:

It is very natural for any of us to miss out any vital or important details while doing a long conversation with the customers. So it is always a wise idea to ask questions and clarify the important points at the end of the conversation so that you can keep track of the vital details and do not miss out any important aspects. This is extremely important in business services in order to ensure customer retention and growth.

It’s easier than you think.

Remain connected with the customers during the entire conversation over the phone and give your customers a feeling that you are there by the side for any support or help. If you can implement all these conversation strategies rightly over the telephone you can go a long way in providing total customer satisfaction.

Never Interrupt In Between:

As a call center agent, you must keep this point in your mind from the day one you start your work. This is extremely crucial in maintaining a good conversation over the telephone and keeps your customers satisfied. You should never interrupt in between a conversation and give your customers ample opportunity to express their point of view so that you can understand their situation.

Here is the deal!

You definitely listen more effectively when you are not talking in between while interacting with your customers. So refrain from doing so and never to interrupt in between. Let the customer say whatever he wants to. You can express your viewpoint after the customer finishes talking. This is the only way to handle customers in the bpo industry.

Avoid Stereotyping:

This is extremely vital and you should avoid doing stereotyping at any cost. Never treat all the customers in the same way based on your similar experience in the past. This can be a blunder while communicating over the telephone and might lead to extreme dissatisfaction. Try to understand the fact that every customer is different from each other and all of them have a different viewpoint. Never try to make assumptions about customers by expecting them to act in a similar manner in all situations. This will never happen and in turn you will be in trouble.

Still not convinced?

Then try to remember what you learned about human behavior. Every human being is different from each other in the way they look, talk and handle the same situation in a different way. You might find a customer getting agitated over a situation while another customer might keep calm in the similar situation. So it is better your always avoid doing stereotyping at call center outsourcing services.

Overcome The Barriers To Listening:

There are certain barriers that hamper our listening skills over the telephone which we should overcome in order to provide excellent customer service. It will definitely take some at the initial stage to overcome these barriers but with practice, you will surely have a solid grip over your telephone conversation skills.

Sounds good, right?

So the most common barrier is that we think we are right on all occasions and the other person is wrong. But this is definitely not the case every time. Secondly, in most cases we like to talk more than we listen and this hinders the process of listening in the middle and we miss out important points. Moreover we anxiously wait for gaps in between the person who is talking so that we can jump into it with our response. Avoid all these barriers and you will notice significant improvement in your telephone listening skills.

Always Keep Pen and Paper Ready:

Always keep a pen and paper handy while you talk with the customer over the phone. This will help you in taking a short note of any vital points or noting down any important question that you might want to ask and clarify. At the end of the conversation do not forget to refer back to the notes you have taken down and take appropriate actions based on that in order to solve the problem of the customer as soon as possible.

To conclude we can say that listening skills are a kind of art which you need to master over time. You will not get a grip over it within one day. You will have to keep on practicing again and again in order to get the desired results. However, there is nothing to worry about as the above-mentioned strategies will help you a lot in mastering the skill of listening over the telephone and get yourself acquainted with it.