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Great speakers and writers know the power of words. The right words can excite, engage, and entertain. They can paint images, spur debate, and chart new directions.

The right words, however, cannot get beyond a listening boundary we create ourselves. In my teaching, consulting, and blogging, I have seen one pesky listening boundary recur across diverse audiences.

Previous experience traps words in one context & blocks listening.

Swim Beyond Your Listening Boundary

1. When we already have strong feeling, emotion, or opinion. In my customer service workshops, the word paraphrase often stops people from listening to what I mean by that word. They picture the horrible experience of agents reading from a script parroting each thing they say. This of course is not paraphrasing. Yet their previous experience temporarily blocks listening.




2. When we have had intense or rigid occupational training. There are some professions where certification or licensing drill people into fixed ways of thinking. Good for performance in that profession; bad for listening and interacting beyond that boundary.




3. When we crave control. Cravings take over mind and body and block listening. Oddly enough, craving control destroys any chance of having control. Without input, our current knowledge becomes outdated or invalid. Listening is the path to continued understanding and success.




4. When we are impatient for results and closure. Time pressures, personality type, fear of failure breed impatience and create a listening boundary.

Listening Beyond the Boundary
Question, digest, and absorb.

1. Replace fear of looking ignorant with strength from active listening.

2. Postpone persuading until you know the field of sway.

3. Consider the context of the communicator before hawking your context.

4. Leave room for various meanings. Language is not a science.

Shall we start a list of common words that trap us in a listening boundary? Or will you share below some other conditions that spawn listening boundaries? I welcome your contributions to this post in the comments section below.

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. For permission to re-post or republish, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Obviously, in sales and customer service, listening is critical to success. Not so obvious is how to listen for customer cares when your mind is processing your own perspective.

What’s in it for you to work on this? Sales & service fail when you don’t address customer cares. Moreover, customers even select higher priced products and services when you show them you get what they care about.

Sales & Customer Service: Listen for Customer Cares

Winning Ways to Listen for Customer Cares

1. Hear the story as well as the details. If you are highly analytic, you may naturally listen for details. You may miss important customer cares because they emerge as the sum of the details. Do you listen for the whole point of the story?
   Winning way: If this is your listening challenge, say to the customer “I hear these details (a. b. c. …). If we put this together, what does it say about your key interest or concern?” It shows the customer you listen & you care!




2. Accept the obvious. Often customers are clearly stating their preferences. When it represents a challenge to what you want or can deliver, do you respond with what’s on your mind?
   Winning way: Paraphrase the customer’s preference then respond. If you do this consistently, you will listen better, sell more, and serve well. You and the customers will connect with mutual success.




3. Be excellent instead of right. Working with others, especially with customers, is first about excellence in connecting. It is the nexus of trust. Successful results come from excellent connections not from you pressing your points at the start. Once you are connected to the customers’ cares, they are more capable of hearing your perspective and valuable ideas.
   Winning way: Respect the differences, learn to love the differences, find the fit. One key step: Spot and Adapt to Personality Types.

Success in sales & service is within your easy reach if you reach outside your own perspective. Staying inside your own zone of communication style, knowledge, and control keeps you comfortably disconnected — from success. Think about it …

Yours in service,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach

What is your best listening skills tip? Please share your people-skills experience in the comments field below.


©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. For permission to re-post or republish, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Whether you are a customer service leader or a customer, you have most likely witnessed great customer service reps (CSRs) or technical support reps. dealing easily with difficult situations. What makes the best CSRs successful is that they define the moments as difficult situations not as difficult customers.

CSRs can change tough situations into successful outcomes with listening, empathy, knowledge, and action. They can’t change people and the best CSRs know this.

Beat Attribution Error

In fact, the best CSRs actually beat a common mistake most people make in everyday life — attribution error.

Attribution error is the tendency to over value personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. (Source: Wikipedia).

Stated simply, we think it’s something inside of the people that makes them act badly. Meanwhile when it is our own behavior, we are more likely to attribute it to external conditions.

Since the best CSRs free themselves from the grip of attribution error, they shine and succeed at:

1. Empathy. They walk easily in the customers’ shoes because they believe external conditions have caused the customers’ behavior. If instead you attribute the behavior to something evil or sinister inside of the customers, how or why would you empathize?

1. Empowerment. They believe that they can fix external conditions and this fuels their desire to work through the details and with the customers.

1. Listening. The best CSRs value listening as critically as surgeons value their instruments. It is through listening that they find the external conditions they must fix.

1. Knowledge. They also use the knowledge of previous customers’ behaviors to prevent future attribution error. The best CSRs have proven to themselves that external conditions cause many of the difficult situations — not malicious customers intending harm.

1. Well-timed Action. CSRs caught in the grip of attribution error, often try to push irate or upset customers to calm down. The best CSRs know that listening and well-timed communication calm the customers and unearth the external conditions leading to action.

The implication for training CSRs is quite clear. Have them do a simple exercise like using another company’s website. As they encounter challenges, do they blame themselves for the difficulty or do they blame external conditions like website design, or internet connection speed etc…? Then raise the issue of attribution error.

The next time upset or irate customers call, the CSRs’ attitudes will be far more empathetic. If you have empowered them to take action, you will also see fewer call escalations to team leaders and supervisors.

BONUS: Lower stress. CSRs who view tough moments as difficult situations that they can fix, experience less stress and greater fulfillment. Now that’s motivation!

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™
M.A. Organizational Psychology

©2011-2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ.  If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post,  please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Related post: Hiring, a Natural Call to Customer Serivce

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service experience, teamwork, and leading change. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

The challenge of excellence is consistency. One of the biggest risks to excellence is habit and repetition.

Excellence is not a repetitious reproduction of the result from last time.  To be consistently great — to create excellence each time – you must start with a fresh attitude each time.  As a result you have the chance to deliver a better result each time.

The goal of excellence unleashes energy, innovation, and commitment.  The results of repetition are often boredom, assumptions, bad listening and a contrived result that fails.  The key lesson is to never confuse repetition for consistency.  In the workplace the implications are far and wide.

Leadership Implications. What message are you sending to your organization? What attitude are you projecting? Ask your teams, “How do we produce excellent results?” If the answers focus primarily on executing a fixed plan, they may believe that excellence is achieved through repetition. The goal is to be consistently great not repetitiously stuck in one plan.

Sales Implications. Great sales professionals know from experience that a rote repetitious script rarely seals the deal. Assumptions — even with a customer you know well — can lose you the deal as well as the customer relationship. Use the current knowledge about the customer and sharp listening to create appropriate questions, ongoing learning, customized solutions, and an excellent sale each time.

Customer Service & Care Implications. As with sales, customer service and customer care take a fatal turn for the worst when delivered with bad listening and robotic actions. Customers want and respond well to care that seems truly focused on their needs. Consistently great service requires customer service reps (CSRs) to re-initiate listening and caring on each interaction from the moment they start work until they go home. A fresh new positive attitude with each chat consistently delivers excellent service.

Consistently Great - Not Through Repetition Image by:NWLens

Here are several ways. Add your ideas to this list!!

1. Before each meeting or interaction, think “Another opening, another show”.
2. Ask “What has changed and how do we still deliver excellence?”
3. Use knowledge, data, listening, and communication to take informed risks.
4. Learn with each fresh new start. The safety of repetition is an illusion.

©2010 Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ.

If you would like to re-post or re-publish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com for permission.

National Customer Service Week 2010 is coming to an end yet the endless demand for superior customer service lives on.  I continue to learn and build my expertise even after 20 years of working with customers across multiple industries.  To honor all who work with customers, I share the following insights to retool, refuel, and revive your spirit even on the toughest day.  I believe you will find inspiration in them for training the best technical support analysts and customer service reps.

In business you get what you want by giving other people what they want. ~ALICE MACDOUGALL

Inspiration for Training the Best

1. Procedures and protocols can block listening. Life is not a protocol. Business is not a protocol. Customers don’t fit into protocols; they build our business. Listen and adapt to them!




2. Compete against yesterday’s high point — not against each other. Some team members are motivated by competition. Replace competition between team members with competition against yesterday’s best service. Beat that everyday and watch service and teamwork soar.




3. Impact beats intention. A Twitter colleague and employee engagement expert, Ava Diamond, wrote that intent does not equal impact. In customer service, I go further and say impact beats intent. Your words and actions must have a positive impact! Your intentions are of little value when the impact of your words was negative.




4. An authentic smile changes everything. Yes, customers can tell when you authentically care and the smile (in person, on the phone, in online chat) is the window to that caring.




5. Being positive to thorny customers does not teach them to be ruder next time. A technical support analyst asked me “Why does a difficult customer deserve to be treated well when s/he is acting badly? Read the answers here … 5 Things to Think With Difficult & Rude Customers.




6. Empathize before you analyze. Verbalizing empathy and commitment to the customer paves a smoother road to problem solving.




7. Kindness Transcends Constraints. A blog post by The Knowledge Bishop reminds all that kindness to the customer keeps the loyalty bond alive while you work to solve the customer’s problem.




8. Scripts are a monologue. The best customer service is a dialogue.




9. Personalize and localize for legendary service. When a customer gives you her/his name, use it when speaking to them. Else you are treating them like a data point. Secondly, learn, understand, and adapt to a customer’s culture. Here’s one positive step in that direction: Regional Differences in American Customers – What They Expect!

What would be your #10 for this list? It could be your original thought or a favorite quote. Leaders, share this list with your team as an inspirational exercise and have them create #10!

Listening is one of the most important people skills for success in business and life. Great listening brings understanding that guides your next steps. I strive daily to improve my own listening ability and I teach listening skills to teams especially with diverse team members.

What can block great listening? Most people know the standard obstacles: external noise, internal thoughts, fatigue, stress, emotion, and so on. There is one obstacle whose power to block listening often goes undetected and as a hidden block it has power over behavior.

Procedures Can Block Listening

Procedures are usually put in place with good intentions to clarify steps, establish a level of quality, and ensure consistency. They are sometimes established for compliance to laws and regulations. These are seemingly advantageous to businesses and professional practices.

Yet not all procedures are mandated by law or regulation. Many procedures do not guarantee quality because they are static in the face of changing needs and situations. How often have you repeatedly heard from a customer service or call center, the procedure is …? When people cling to procedures, the procedures can block listening.


An Illustration
A colleague recently went for her mammogram. She likes to take copies of the films home and has done so each year. She brings them back with her the following year so the radiologist can compare the new films to the previous ones. This year the technician said, “We have changed our procedure and no longer give you copies of the films to take home.” My colleague asked why and the technician simply replied ‘we don’t do it anymore.’ The technician had stopped listening.

My colleague noted she would be willing to pay any extra fee for the copies. The technician then started to question my colleague’s reasons for wanting copies of the films: “Are you going to see a specialist? Will you need these films for …” The technician wasn’t listening to a simple request, she was going through the checklist of exceptions in the procedure! When my colleague said she would find another place to get a mammogram, the technician agreed to give her copies of the films and for no extra charge. Clinging to procedures blocked listening and delivered very poor client service.

As leaders you can minimize the blocking power of procedures by explaining them as procedural guidelines. Unless a procedure is required by law or regulation, it’s listening, understanding, and clear thinking that should influence behavior and decisions — not adherence to standard procedures.

Have procedures become a crutch and a listening block on your teams?

Does clinging to procedures block other things, like innovation?

Leaders, what else do you do to capture the benefits of procedures without suffering the risky disadvantages?

Flickr: HugoVK

Is your positive attitude helping yourself and others?  Or are you so extremely positive that you drive others crazy?  Science Daily (July 3, 2009) published an article on the research of Dr. Joanne Wood and Dr. John Lee with interesting results about positive self-affirmations.   The results showed that some people do better when they are allowed to verbalize both the negative and the positive.    (See link below.)

I have a positive view of life and see life’s challenges straight ahead of me.  I take action to create a good life and learn from my experiences — both good and bad   However, I meet others who see the negatives more than the positives.  They live differently and I respect their choices.  Some have told me they were inspired by my positive outlook and actions.  Others go their own way.  I have also met people who try to convert me to their positivism before seeing how positive I already am!  This turns me off to what they have to offer.

So here are three steps to prevent positivism from being patronizing, controlling, and insensitive in everyday life.  [NOTE: In organizations and teams, positive can-do attitudes and positive disagreements are essential to meeting goals.  Too much negativity can slow momentum and derail end results.]

1.Coach only when asked.  In everyday life, don’t elect yourself someone else’s life coach.  Even positive words like “I would like to encourage you to …” are somewhat arrogant if the person didn’t ask for your help.   Live and enjoy your own positivism but don’t declare yourself Prince of PositiveLand and issue decrees.  You may become known as a royal pain in the a_ _.

2. Listen in the moment and understand others’ perspectives.  Listening builds trust through respect.  Extremely positive people are sometimes so busy encouraging others to be positive they don’t stop and listen to the moment others are in.  Everyone in this life is on a journey and they travel at different speeds.   Some get to positivism faster than others.  Some don’t even want to go there.  Exception: If you are a leading an organization through change and a true resistor is slowing the pace with mega-negativity, you will need to address that very clearly to ensure the momentum of change.

3.Disagree honestly and with respect. Become comfortable with honest respectful disagreement.  People disagree in life.  Working through disagreements often delivers great results.  Yet sometimes extremely positive people patronize during a disagreement because they seek immediate harmony.  Disagreement can be a positive if it is respectful.

Live positively and let others see your positive outlook and actions.  Be careful of pushing them to be positive — you could create the opposite effect.

I welcome your additions to this list and your other relevant comments below.  Here is the link to the Science Daily article mentioned above: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090702110503.htm

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach

MA Organizational Psychology

When I was a senior in high school, my father told me to take typing “because all girls should know how to type.”  WHAT, I screamed.  As I raged on about this remark and swore never to take typing, my mother offered another view. “You are going to college next year right?” Yes, I shot back.  “Well how will you do your papers if you can’t type?  It has nothing to do with being a girl.”

Despite my father’s attitude which made me scream, I did take typing as a graduating senior and my fingers still scream the keyboard at 90 words a minute.  I typed all my papers quickly in college while many pulled all-nighters. Moreover, I made money typing others’ papers from their handwritten drafts. 

After college I took a job as a computer programmer. My fingers screamed the keyboard at 90 words a minute.  As other programmers hunted and pecked their code, I took a longer lunch.  After my IT jobs, I started my own training/consulting practice where once again my fingers screamed the keyboard typing reports, email, and now for tweets on Twitter and discussions on LinkedIn.

Thankfully, I had seen the wisdom in my mother’s perspective.  Moreover, I learned something far more important than typing.  On your life’s journey, what sounds like bad advice isn’t always bad.  How you hear it makes the difference. You owe it to yourself to consider ideas before you make a choice.  This will affect your personal relationships, your team efforts at work, the customer experiences you deliver, the sales you make, and most importantly your life choices.

What colors your ability to listen, assess, and find a hidden pearl of wisdom?

• Dislike for the messenger’s attitude and other views
• Your map that doesn’t allow for a detour
• Internal noise – your thoughts saying no instead of hmm … what if
• Baggage and bad memories
• Fear
• Short-sighted view of life

How many people (older than Gen Y) imagined this online life at the keyboard?  How many including Gen Y imagined this terrible economic crisis?  Yet can you remember your grandparents saying save for a rainy day?  Did you dismiss it as old-fashioned and irrelevant?

Have you ever heard the expression: It’s amazing how wise your parents become as you get older?  That isn’t to say you should cling to the past.  Rather as you live in the present, improving how you hear things can open your life to new horizons.  You may discover an idea that will change your life.  

When I was unhappy with my IT jobs and struggling to create a happy life, a career counselor assessed my picture and told me that I wanted to be self-employed.  I was baffled and thought she’s crazy.  Then I thought, hmm …what if? 

I explored it, researched it, planned it and did it!  That was 20 years ago and I never looked back. She was right and it changed my life.  Thank you, Paulette Zimmerman, for that pearl of wisdom and I thank myself for thinking hmm… what if?

What advice would you give graduating seniors from high school, tech. school, and college?

I’ll start the list and ask that you add your advice below in the comments field.

• Learn as much as you can — everywhere you can. You never know what will become a pearl!
• Build fun and responsibility into your life starting today.
• Associate with people of all ages – your age, older, and younger. Pearls of wisdom are hidden in others’ experiences.
• Create your life with vision, persistence, patience, and the disciplined action to get there.

Now it’s on to my next hmm… what if? 

Update on this post: A couple of days after I wrote this article, I found an article in USA Today by Alan Webber, entitled “Hey, Grads, It’s Time to Write New Rules”.   He straight out says never stop learning.   He has published a book with many more rules called Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself. 

Parents, the book might be a great family read and discussion to mentor your teens and college grads into adult life! 

If you wish to share this info on other blogs and websites, please credit this URL.  I welcome your additions to the advice list in the comments field below and welcome your tweets at http://twitter.com/KateNasser.

Happy Mother’s Day Mom.

Many thanks for your pearls,

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach

A recent experience brings me to this customer service reminder.  When interacting with the customer, use the customer’s jargon not yours.   Here’s a simple true story …

A financial professional switches from selling to financial advisory firms to giving financial advice to consumers — in this case us.  In his previous job, he was speaking to people who already spoke his financial jargon.  It was daily interaction on financial products under the same regulations.  They spoke with the same jargon using spreadsheets and pie charts.  They communicated in the same way.  A perfect fit.

Now, he is advising non-financial industry professionals on their lifetime savings.  The problem: he still uses financial industry jargon and assumes we understand.  He sends us pie charts, spreadsheets, and big thick books to read.  We ask him “How much did those transactions cost us?”  We want a simple $ amount.  He sends us a paragraph with no numbers in it.

The frustration is overwhelming.  We view him as non-customer focused.  He is making life difficult.   Can you envision what is about to happen? 

What do your customers think of you and your service?   Do you use the customers’ jargon or yours?

Remember:

1. Speak the language of the customer to build trust and loyalty!
2. Ask open-ended questions that unearth what they want to achieve.
3. Listen with their listening-style.
4. Ask creative follow-up questions.
5. Use their jargon — not yours!

©2009 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach

908.595.1515 (USA)