KateNasser.com

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.

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.

---

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, has amassed 21 years of stellar results with corporate customers turning interpersonal obstacles into business success. Her energy is legendary, her insight objective, and her results tangible. See this site for info about her keynotes, workshops, and dvds.

A positive attitude and enthusiasm are essential tools for sales and customer service. A recent study at the Wharton School of Business showed how mood affects customer service performance.

Customer service representatives (also known as a CSRs) who start the day with enthusiasm and a positive mood deliver better service throughout the day. Most would agree that the same applies to sales teams’ success.

So the more enthusiasm in sales and service the better, right? As a mindset or mood, yes.

As a communication style, über enthusiasm can overwhelm and turn off the customer. In other words, there are ups & downs to enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm’s Ups & Downs

1. Enthusiasm for customer service shows the customer you care. When it drives you to do all the talking, it tells them you don’t care enough to listen.
2. Enthusiasm in technical support drives you to solve even the toughest problems for customers. When you show the customer enthusiasm for broken technology, they think you care more about technology than you do about them.
3. Enthusiasm for the products and services you sell, captures the customer’s attention. When you spew it like a geyser, you stop the development of great customer relationships.
4. Enthusiasm sustains your objectivity and commitment when facing an irate customer.  When you ooze enthusiasm on an irate customer, you come across as insensitive. Your actions lack empathy.

Sales and service tip: Before you take off on an exciting ride, make sure that you and the customer are together!

---

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers keynotes and workshops that take sales and service teams from inspiration to action! Her results are legendary. See this site for more information.

Recent studies show that loyal customers are the ones that find your service easy.  For hotels and the hospitality and travel industry, this has morphed into frequent guest profiles on room type, or rental car preference, or aisle/window choice on an airplane.

They have created a standard process on certain service items to earn customer loyalty. It’s just a beginning.

Hotels must go far beyond that and rewards programs to earn the customer loyalty especially of frequent business travelers. They must:

Make it easy for customers to get exceptions to the standard process and sustain those exceptions throughout each stay.

Most hotels don’t sustain customers’ exceptions. The hotels are driven by standard processes and handle each exception as a transaction. You can make a special request and hopefully they deliver on that exception. Yet if it’s something you want every day during the stay or for every stay, you must request it each time.

A recent example: Sheraton hotel provided two bath towels, two hand towels, and two wash cloths in the room. I asked for two additional bath towels. They delivered. The next day housekeeping gave me — you guessed it — just two bath towels, two hand towels etc… Each day I had to request the same exception to their standard process.

Delivering great customer service when requested may get you high customer satisfaction scores. Delivering pro-active customer service may win you great acclaim.

But to earn customer loyalty, deliver easy exceptions and sustain those exceptions. Why? In this example, it’s just one easy phone call each day for some towels right? Easy maybe. Loyalty building it isn’t.

Customer loyalty is earned from easy exceptions that you remember to deliver each time. When you sustain the customers’ exceptions, you are telling them you remember their needs. Being remembered and cared for creates psychological comfort. That earns you the customers’ trust and thus their loyalty.

Picture yourself as a customer. Think about the diner waitress who remembers exactly how you want your eggs. The dry cleaner who knows your name and remembers your preferences. The consultant who already knows your hot buttons and key concerns. The dentist who knows your pain tolerance and how to ease it. The florist who remembers what flowers you send your mother even when you don’t!

This type of customer service becomes more than service. To the customer, you become an essential part of their easy life. If a hotel makes my life easy, I don’t even consider a different hotel for my next trip. You prevent the question mark from forming in my mind. Your hotel becomes my sanctuary when you sustain my exceptions to your standard processes.

This is a challenge for large scale operations yet it is feasible with modern technology. How about easy online portals for all customers to send in their exception requests in advance — without having to call? Or even when they are on site? How about special request kiosks on each floor? Perhaps hand held devices on housekeeping carts that give the staff just in time info on what each customer wants?

Capitalize on the fact that most people don’t like change. They like comfortable easy situations that they can rely on especially when far from home. Following your standard process is a change. You earn their loyalty by making exceptions easy to get and remembering to deliver them each time.


Will it be your brand? If yes, let me know and I will be a regular at your hotel!


From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

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

---

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers actionable customer service insights through workshops, keynotes, consultations, and DVDs. Now in her 21st year in business, her stellar results are well known in the customer service industry. See this site for more information.

Customer care (customer service, help desks, technical support, contact call center) reps,  sometimes struggle with showing empathy to angry customers. Heck, some struggle with showing empathy to any customer!

Throughout 20 years of inspiring and training professionals to understand the customer’s perspective and empathize to build customer loyalty, I have seen some who are naturally good at it, some who learn it, and others who struggle with it.

Most puzzling to me have been those whom I have seen empathizing with customers — except with angry or irate customers. If you or your customer care reps find it difficult to empathize with customers — especially angry or irate customers — is fear of emotion part of the reason?  I believe that it could be. I have met professionals (many not even in customer care) who are afraid to empathize with a colleague, a customer, or even a boss. They have said to me, “What if the person gets more emotional when I empathize?”

Moreover, recent research has taken on the subject of negative emotions and empathy. In one such study, subjects empathized more with those who showed fear than with those who showed anger. Turning Bad Emotions Into Empathy and ProSocial Behavior post reports: “While there is a huge range of human emotion, recent studies have suggested that a fearful facial expression is a more salient elicitor of prosocial behavior than are other facial expressions, such as surprise or anger.”

Are you more likely to show empathy to a customer who shows you their fear — credit card problems or serious technical difficulties or critical health issues — rather than their anger? Is it because their fear doesn’t frighten you but their anger does?

The issue is critical in customer service, technical support, and customer care because it affects customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Showing empathy to customers, angry or not, builds bonds to your product, service, and brand.

Lose the fear of the customer’s anger to build your empathy skills. Here is a post to help you do exactly that Two Mindsets to Show Empathy for Irate Customers.

What else do you think blocks people’s ability to show empathy? I welcome your comments below.

©2010 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, has a Masters in Organizational Psychology and a natural intuition about people. She delivers highly interactive workshops, info-packed webinars, and distance learning DVDs on this and many customer service topics including customer care in technical support.

Customer care, the true sense of wanting to help customers, is a subject that has intrigued me for many years.   Why do I feel so much inspiration to care for customers?

You might immediately think personality type. Maybe some types are more innately inspired to care for customers. Yet, I am not an amiable on the personality scale.  In fact, I have seen many different personality types working quite well in customer care.

Maturity? I have always felt the inspiration to care even as a teenager with summer jobs.  Money?  Well, summer jobs didn’t pay much. In fact, read the myriad of blog articles that claim CSRs are demotivated because they don’t get paid enough to care.  (I don’t agree with that one.)

Well I have spent much of my professional life inspiring customer service and tech support reps to care for customers. Leader after leader has asked me the same question, “How can we motivate our reps to deliver better customer care?”.   One day, I heard the same question again. This time it hit me that the obstacle the leader faced was not the reps — it was the concept of motivation.

Motivation

The concept of motivation conjures up images of offering comp days if they consistently reach their metrics or scheduling a pizza party if they clear the backlog in the email queue. There is nothing inherently wrong with offering these carrots to accomplish a short term goal. It will not, however, create consistently high quality customer care. The effect of the motivator wears off the same way an advertisement loses its marketing/sales effectiveness over time. It no longer motivates.

Inspiration

On the other hand, inspiration is something deep inside your reps and consistently there. The actual feeling varies in each person. Here is a short list of inspiration points I have tapped in thousands of reps over the years. You will notice a common thread. Inspiration is integral to what makes the individual rep naturally feel good.  What would you add to this list?

1. Making a difference in the customer’s life that day. To do that, the reps need to be empowered to actually help.   Reading from scripts and having to pass all exceptions to a supervisor is not inspirational.
2. Seeing how their work contributes to the company and the customer’s success. A director of customer services recently told me that their initial attempt at training reps included a product manager delivering a Powerpoint presentation on the products.  She was in the back of the room and saw the reps disengaging, looking around, swiveling their chairs.   She decided to redo the customer service reps training program and had them actually touching the products, installing them, and so forth.  The results were amazing.  In fact, the results were inspired!
3. Living what it feels like to be a customer.
4. Enjoyment and fun. There are people who begin to care about others when they feel good themselves. It doesn’t have to be constant fun — life rarely is. Yet if there is no fun, these reps will not be inspired to give more.
5. Respect for their individual talents. Perhaps one of the most common inspiration points is people being known and respected for their individual talents — at least in our American culture. In eastern philosophies/cultures, this is not necessarily the case.

©2010 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, is an inspirational and activational speaker and trainer in customer service and teamwork. Her years of experience, her natural intuition about people, and passion for people-skills always take your organization to a higher level of performance.  See her video footage on this site.

A customer service trainer and colleague, Laurie Brown of TheDifference.Net, often asks customer service reps What Business Are You In?. What would you reply? The customer service and care business? Or would you reply the airline business, the retail business, the technology business, the healthcare business? As a leader, your answer directly impacts what you and your employees think, say, and do for the customer.

You may see this as logical for the teams directly tasked with customer service, customer care and sales. Yet leaders, ask yourselves, do all your employees think that customer care is their job? Do you think so? We know the legendary philosophy of Disney, Nordstroms, and Ritz Carlton. We also know that not every company embraces it. Reasons range from “cost” to “industry differences”.

So consider this post a plea to reconsider and a getting started guide for the sake of your business.

Even if you keep non-customer facing teams truly separated from the customer, they must think and act customer care in order to enable your sales, customer service, and customer care teams to wow the customer. If they do have occasion to speak with the customer, they must switch their mindset and communication from company focused to customer focused in an instant!

You can get started with no delay and little cost. Use the stories and questions below to spur conversation and action on customer care with the leaders that report to you and throughout your organization.

Accelerate to Customer Care

1. Exceptions. Non-customer facing teams often live in the world of procedures and standard practices. Customer facing teams like sales, customer service, and customer care live in the world of flexing and adapting to customers’ requests. The gap between these two worlds is where you lose customers and also lose morale among the customer facing teams.
   Action item: Minimize this gap by having customer facing and non-customer facing teams meet and identify the few highest risk areas where procedures must be followed. All else can be flexed and changed to meet the customers’ requests. The bonus from these meetings — better teamwork among all the teams.
   
   
   
2. Workarounds. To deliver on those exceptions, sometimes employees must first think workarounds rather than the total fix. Here is a story I have used for years to illustrate this as I teach customer care to non-customer facing teams: A customer facing team calls you about a customer’s pressing need. The customer reports he is having trouble printing the financial report and it must be in his CEO’s hands in 10 minutes.
   I then pose this question to workshop participants: What is the problem to be solved? Most of them reply “fix the printer” or “find out why the printer isn’t working”. Bzzzz — wrong answer. The problem to be solved is — get the report to the CEO in 10 minutes! Step 1: What are the possible solutions to achieving this in the time frame needed? Step 2: Once accomplished, what are the solutions to preventing a repeat call?
   Customer facing teams clearly see the purpose of two steps because they experience the urgency on the call. Non-customer facing teams often do not. They often skip step 1.
   Action item: Teach this simple yet powerful principle to your teams.
   
   
   
3. The New Boss. Non-customer facing teams’ loyalty and focus is frequently to their managers. Their managers write their performance reviews and have a say in promotions. Although this is true of customer facing teams as well, these managers know that in many ways the customer is the boss. The standards these managers use include customer satisfaction and customer WOW feedback. Not always so with the leaders and managers of non-customer facing teams.
   Action item: Include customer satisfaction and customer care teamwork in evaluations of non-customer facing team members.
   
   

What would you add to this list to get all employees to think customer care? Would love to hear from you in the comments field below.

©2010 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, has delivered customer care, customer service, and team building workshops for 20 years. Her new training DVD on adapting to regional differences of USA customers is now available. See preview Customer Service USA – What They Expect Coast to Coast.

If you are working in a call center (also known as customer care and customer service centre)  inside or outside of the USA, every call you get from the USA could have one of nine lives. Why?  Because we Americans (USA) may share a common language and citizenship yet as customers the similarities end there.

Ring ring. Who’s there? An American customer?  No. There is no such thing as an American customer. There is a New York customer, a Northeast customer, a Southeast customer, a Midwest customer, a Texan customer, a West Coast customer, a Pacific Northwest customer, an Alaskan customer, and of course a Hawaiian customer.

Each call brings a different set of expectations about what is great treatment.

A LinkedIn contact center colleague from Australia recently asked – we all speak English so what’s the issue? The issue is that satisfying a customer means understanding how they want to be treated interpersonally. In sales and customer service, it pays to know how to interact and communicate to your diverse customers – which is different than just speaking the same language.  In other words, courtesy is defined differently in diverse cultures.  In America, courtesy is defined very differently in various regions of the country.

20 years ago when I started my consulting and training practice, I didn’t even know this. Yet the years on the road have given me an invaluable education on these substantive differences in American customers.

If you have traveled the USA, you may well know this too. Yet many Contact Call Centres around the world are staffed by those who have not yet had that experience. The phone rings and Call Centre reps are left to guess which of the nine lives they are talking to at that moment and how to communicate with this American stranger.

Where are these call centers? Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, UK, Middle East, Africa, Canada, South America and Australia.

Even customer service centers in the USA have found it difficult to deal with customers from another part of the USA. How have they met that challenge?  They have attended workshops on regional USA differences that impact customer service. Does the USA really vary that much? Absolutely.

Now this workshop is available “live” on DVD for every call centre to use for training. Customer Service USA – What They Expect Coast to Coast and Everywhere In Between turns American strangers into customers you know how to serve well. You will know exactly how to satisfy each and every American customer across the nation. Thankfully, the information is easy to absorb and quickly apply. 

---

“I enjoyed Customer Service USA DVD we saw today. The second call I took when I got back on the phones was from a gentleman from New York. I picked up my pace and got right to the points of how navigate our website and he was off my phone in no time and I could tell by his tone he was satisfied with the results. Very useful information! Thanks sincerely.”

Drew Schmoll, Customer Service Agent

---

Preview the DVD before you purchase it and then get ready to teach and entertain your reps with the info they need to satisfy customers and consumers across the USA. This is a unique tool that enables your reps to meet the expectations of diverse American customers and wins you the loyalty of this large customer base.

---

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, has packaged 20 years of American customer service experience into this DVD with her signature style of energy, passion, humor, and practicality. It is the perfect way to train contact call center, customer care, consumer affairs and technical support reps taking calls from diverse USA customers!

5 Comments »

In a recent post on Bury These Phrases for the Best Teamwork, I buried the phrase “I am sorry you feel that way …”. It is a masquerade of an apology that scars team relationships.

One visitor to my blog, asked me if it was acceptable, however, to say that to an irate, angry, or upset customer? She went on to say that in several training workshops on how to handle irate or angry customers, they teach this and actually require the CSRs to say it. “So that you do not need to verbalize an apology, use I am sorry you feel that way to diffuse the emotion and move on to solving the issue at hand.”

This is an abomination. Irate customers are adults who have lost trust and that is where the emotion begins. They want to be heard. The worst thing you can do is dance around and try to avoid responsibility.

I have been teaching how to handle irate customers for 20+ years and cringe at the thought of anyone teaching dedicated CSRs or technical support reps to say I am sorry you feel that way.

It is as bad as calm down and relax. In essence you are telling the customer that their emotion is unacceptable and that you are not responsible.

Let the irate, angry or upset customers vent their frustrations verbally. When they come up for air, there are several statements you can use one of which is a true apology for their experience. Yet if your company truly wants to avoid an apology (why I do not know), at least validate the irate customer’s emotion with something like “Clearly we have upset you. Let’s fix this now…” or “I hear your frustration and I am here to fix it.”

If you want customer loyalty, use “Clearly we have upset you and we are sorry. I am here to resolve the issues.” Stay away from “I understand”. Irate and angry customers are speaking from emotion. Most interpret “I understand” to mean “I understand your pain” which you don’t — and they yell that back at you.

What do you think? When you are the irate or angry customer, would you want someone to say to you “I am sorry you feel that way …”?

By the way, if you want more information on how to stay positive and objective with an irate or angry customer, here are two posts with key images: The Best Mindset and Training to Deal with Irate Customers and 5 Things to Think with Thorny Customers.

©2010 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, delivers top notch workshops on customer service and teamwork people-skills for transformational results. See the workshop outlines on this site.

20 Comments »

Rude customers in customer service work do not have to wear to you down. Rude customers can actually be the best people-skills learning experience you will ever have. Think these 5 things when working with rude customers for best results and to avoid getting upset. I have been teaching people-skills, teamwork, and customer service for 20+ years. The right thoughts and mindset affect everything.

THINK these 5 things and let the people-skills learning begin!! Do it daily as a mantra and your outlook toward rude customers (and rude people in general) will change.

---

1. Thorns don’t attack you; they protect them.
   Plants have thorns to protect them. So do people. When you hear a person’s thorns, recognize their fear and weakness. The thorns are not attacking you. They are protecting them. Do not attack out of your fear and you will not get pricked by their thorns.




2. Easy doesn’t sharpen a thorn. One of the most common questions I receive is “Aren’t we teaching them to be rude next time if we are nice to rude customers this time?” No! Your positive responses do not teach them to be thornier! Thorny customers are adults who make their own decisions.




3. De-thorning them will hurt you! If a stranger tried to kick down your defense mechanisms (like your front door), how would you react? The customers do not have a family relationships or close friendships with you. To them you are a stranger. If you try to clip their thorns directly, they will prick you back.




4. Empathize Emotion; Don’t Analyze the Thorns! Trying to analyze a customer’s thorns in the few minutes you have to deliver service is not feasible or logical. It takes therapists years to analyze a client’s emotions. Yours is to deliver service, not to change the customer. Show empathy for their emotion; don’t analyze their thorns.




5. Positivity Beats Equality; Don’t be a Thorn! During a recent workshop a technical support rep asked me “Why does a rude customer acting badly deserved to be treated well?”. I replied, “You treat the customer well because it works. It gets you to the end goal.” Treating the customer badly will not get the customer to treat you well. More importantly, it will veer you off course from business success. Positivity beats equality as a winning strategy in customer service.

Be the sun, not the thorn. You can’t change people yet you can influence the situation!

©2010-2011 Kate Nasser, The People-SKills Coach, Somerville, NJ.
If you with to reprint or republish this article or any portion of it, please email info@katenasser.com for permission. Thank you for honoring intellectual capital.

---

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers inspiration to action for professional people-skills through workshops, keynotes, video webinars, training dvds, and consulting sessions. She has Masters degree in Organizational Psychology and 20 years of experience in customer service, teamwork, and leading change. Preview and get her new training dvd “Customer Service USA – Expectations Across America” by clicking on that box in the right sidebar on this site.

A current online article, 10 Things You Would Like to Say to a Rude Customer claims that the world is becoming more uncivil and that rude customers are wearing down customer service reps (CSRs).

The first half of the claim may be true. The second need not be. You and your entire team can start each customer service day with 5 emotionally intelligent thoughts to deliver the best customer service. If you choose the 10 thoughts in the article noted above, then you are choosing to become part of the uncivil world.

My passion and work for 20+ years has been emotionally intelligent (EI) people-skills for the best customer service and teamwork. Trust me, great people-skills emerge from the right mindset. What you are thinking when you are with the customer will become your customer service persona and affect your daily happiness. If right now, you want to say to me “they ruin my daily happiness”, then you are embracing their mindset and living their life.

Choose Your Mindset – Not Theirs.
Before you start each customer service day, choose and fill your mind with the 5 best emotionally intelligent (EI) customer service thoughts. It will also transmit to every customer — the “rude” ones and the civil ones. So just as a satellite receives and sends signals, your mindset can do the same.

---

1. Put Your Mindset on the Right Channel to Get a Clear Picture
   If you set your mind purely on the emotion coming at you, you will most likely view the transmission emotionally. I hear the emotion so that I can empathize. Yet my mind is tuned to what the customer needs not to the emotion.




2. Empathize Emotion; Don’t Analyze It! Trying to analyze or justify a customer’s emotion in the few minutes you have to deliver service is not feasible or logical. It takes therapists years to analyze a client’s emotions. Yours is to deliver service, not to change the customer.




3. Don’t Trade a Shiny Heirloom Coin for a Slug. Why trade your positive mindset for the negative one coming at you? If you had a valuable heirloom coin and someone walked up and offered you a slug coin, would you trade it? Hardly. Hold on to your positive outlook. It will give you and your loved ones a lifetime of happiness.




4. Positivity Beats Equality! During a recent workshop a technical support rep asked me “Why does a customer acting badly deserved to be treated well?”. I replied, “Because it works. Treating the customer well gets you to the end goal. Positivity beats equality as a winning strategy in customer service. Treating the customer badly will not get the customer to treat you well and it will veer you off course from business success.




5. Recharge Your Battery. It takes energy to speak positively and energy can drain. Did you ever notice that you get less patient as you get tired? Most people do. So make sure you recharge your battery after work and throughout the day. Heck even cell phones lose their strength and we plug them in and give them juice. Do the same for yourself. You deserve it!

Remember, inner strength is its own billboard. When you find yourself thinking the 10 thoughts in the article noted at the beginning of this post, you are spraying graffiti on your own billboard — your precious mindset and happiness. The customer has not ruined your day. You have chosen to live their emotion. Live your life, not theirs.

©2010-2011 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, delivers both inspiration and activation for professional people-skills through workshops, keynotes, video webinars, training dvds, and consulting sessions. She has a natural GPS for people, a Masters degree in Organizational Psychology, and 20 years of experience in customer service, teamwork, and leading change. Preview and get her new training dvd “Customer Service USA – Expectations Across America” by clicking on that box in the right sidebar on this site.

Customer service training programs for Call Centers, Customer Service Centers, and Technical Support Help Desks often fall short of the one tool that makes every interaction successful. What is the one thing that the best CSRs (customer service reps) and technical support reps do well? The best adapt to the customer’s personality type to deliver A+ customer service every time.

Picture a driver type customer calling for customer service and a CSR with an amiable personality type picking up the phone. Will this go well? It will if the CSR knows how to adapt to a driver personality type. Can you imagine a high expressive CSR and a deep analytic customer working well together? It will be far more productive if the CSR knows how to adapt to personality type.

Train all CSRs and technical support reps on how to quickly spot and adapt to personality type. Then celebrate all the positive results — customer delight, faster call handling, increased productivity, flexible teams that handle change well, and an A+ customer service reputation.

Good news. There is a quick way to spot and adapt to each personality type with tangible steps to success every time! Here is actual footage from my customer service training program “GPS Your Brain to Work With Any Personality Type”. I am ready to train you and all your teams on this fast method of spotting the four personality types and exactly how to adapt to each.

Footage filmed by www.dolcevideo.com.

Practice using this tool and it becomes one of the most far reaching and powerful professional people skills you will use in each and every career you choose. When you can speak in a way that is comfortable for someone else, you become very influential. In customer service, it is essential for delivering A+ customer service.

©2010-2011 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, delivers advanced people-skills training and keynotes to span the differences between people and create superior customer service and teamwork. She has also just released a training DVD on adapting to customers’ geographic differences. Click here for Customer Service USA – Coast to Coast Expectations.

The best customer service representative (CSR) training on dealing with and handling an irate customer tells you to not take it personally and suggests appropriate things to say to calm the customer. Yet in the 20 years I have been teaching how to handle an irate customer, the most frequent question CSRs and technical support reps ask me is how to stay objective and not take it personally.

Message to Each CSR: Choose either mindset that makes the most sense to you. Use it and you will stay objective. You can use both. I use #1 every time and add more of #2 when I feel my objectivity slipping.

---

1. Don’t seize control! A car stops when the driver applies the brakes, or hits an obstacle, or runs out of gas. You are not driving the car. The customer is driving. If you reach over and try to apply the brakes, the customer will most likely fight back. It’s hard to stay objective when you are in a fight. If you start talking right away, you become the obstacle and the crash leaves dents/scars on you and them. Again, it will be tough to stay objective when you are scarred. If you let the driver and the car run out of gas, you stay objective and ready to help. The driver asks for help when the car can no longer run. Caution: This is not a comic moment. Do not say, “I’ll just wait for you to run out of gas and then you will listen to me.” This is a mindset not something you say.




2. Yours is to Heal! The next time a customer is yelling, picture this: You see a stranger in a restaurant fall and get hurt. S/he is lying on the floor right next to your table yelling in pain. Would you think they were yelling about you and get upset with them? Probably not. It’s the same with your customer. Like a medical professional or a para-medic — yours is to heal.

---

A Broken Trust. Irate customers feel they have been wronged. Your company has lost their trust. They want you to know that they have a right to be upset. If you speak too soon, they think you are telling them they are wrong.  Let them have their say. As much as you do not like to hear irate customers, it is a sign that they are still interested in your company. Else they would simply walk away forever and tell everyone they know!

When they are done with the emotion, your empathy and action will resolve the issue. When you do this service recovery well, you may actually turn this irate customer into a loyal customer. It’s possible!

---

I look forward to further developing your team’s customer service skills with these workshops: Delivering the Ultimate Customer Experience. The workshops are very participative, high energy, fun, and info-packed.

Take a look this footage on adapting to personality types for a little taste of the fun: Spot and Adapt to Each Customer’s Personality Type.

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

©2010-2011 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, brings passion, intuition, and 20 years of experience to teaching business leaders, owners, and team members how to reach the heights of service for customer relations and business profits. See this site for workshop outlines and DVD footage.

Esther Denn, eDenn Property Management, recently asked me to pen a blog post on delivering great customer service to increase customer loyalty. Property management is a fast paced field and you need more than occupational knowledge to succeed. Entire teams must truly understand the value of the customer and deliver every aspect of daily customer service from that mindset. As I wrote the post, one thought kept recurring – easy does it for customer loyalty! Every customer celebrates, remembers, returns, and refers when the experience with you was easy.

This post is valuable for any business whether you are the CEO or a CSR because: Customers Remember Moments – What Do They Remember About You? Don’t leave it up to chance.

Are your customer service representatives, CSRs and technical support teams, working with customers in other countries? How strong are their intercultural people-skills? Immigrants, ex-pats, and companies doing business in other countries can be far more successful with just a little more attention to intercultural people skills (also known as soft skills). If you want a job, a sale, or a great customer service review, step outside of your own perspective and use an intercultural approach. Customers and employers make decisions from their cultural zone not yours.

Two Examples

---

Canada and the USA share a common language not culture.

Nick Noorani writes on the blog The Expatriate Mind Nine Soft Skills No Immigrant Should Be Without: “Skilled immigrants often focus on improving technical skills. After coming to Canada, they are shocked when they are told they have no Canadian experience.” Then he cites an example where a courier needing his signature asked him for his John Hancock — an American expression to be sure. Yet the courier was working in Canada!

CSRs outside the USA.

Many USA customer service call centers are now located outside America (some in Canada and some off-shore). How well do the CSRs in Canada and off-shore understand the regional differences across the USA? Adapting to these differences as you speak to American customers distinguishes your customer service from those that don’t adapt. Intercultural adaptation builds customer loyalty.

I have outlined these American regional differences and how to adapt in a new customer service training DVD: Customer Service USA – What They Expect Coast to Coast and Everywhere in Between.

You already provide phone and web technology to connect your CSRs and technical support teams with your customers. Turn that connection into a profitable loyal bond with intercultural training. For companies with USA customers, this means adapting to regional differences – North, South, East, West, and everywhere in between. In Canada there are both cultural and regional differences that global companies can learn and embrace to build Canadian customer loyalty.

For companies doing business interculturally, the key to customer loyalty is:
Learn the differences
Respect the differences
Love the differences &
Find the fit!

I welcome your comments, contributions, and feedback below. For information on purchasing the training DVD, please click on the link above.

Please visit this blog again for many other people-skills posts on customer service, teamwork, and intercultural connections.

---

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, is a highly respected soft skills, customer service, and team building trainer. In her new training DVD, she shares 20 years of first hand experience working with customers in every region of the USA. Tap this experience for your company!

Kudos and a heartfelt thank you to Verizon Wireless CSR Lori-El.

Customer service rep (CSR) Lori-El worked through confusing issues on my account with an inquisitive intelligent approach while taking care (and I do mean care) of me. I would definitely rate her as one of the best call center CSRs I have had in recent times.

In the last blog post I focused on The 25 Worst Customer Service Stories to Train the Best CSRs.

Today I am very pleased to outline how the best CSRs act in delivering customer service. Please add your best actions in the comments field below.

Best CSRs Action Checklist

Verizon Wireless CSR Lori-El did this well in delivering customer service.

1. Sincere conversation not a scripted recitation.
2. Listens for the customer’s personality and demeanor and then maps actions to it.
3. Listens to every piece of information the customer offers without jumping over words.
4. Shares control of the call with the customer instead of driving it through a predetermined path.
5. Listens to the customer’s level of knowledge and speaks to that level (not above or below).
6. Thanks the customer for input during the call not just at the end.
7. Apologizes once for the length of time it is taking to resolve it and keeps moving on resolving it!
8. Asks permission to access the customer’s records and then uses the information to go the extra mile.
9. Continues to listen to related questions and answers them clearly.
10. Uses confusing moments to learn and then teach the customer instead of saying. “I don’t know.”
11. Is honest about current obstacles to resolution and then finds a work-around!
12. Sounds happy to be at work even when doing overtime or having a tough day.
13. Streamlines future contact by giving an updated phone number to call.
14. Uses positive forward focused language instead of negative phrases.
15. The conversation shows responsibility and initiative in resolving the problems. Never blames the customer.
16. Resolves the current issues and then considers the customer’s future needs and forecasts solutions. (e.g. If you switch to a Blackberry or SmartPhone you might encounter this problem and we can fix that as well.)
17. Tone of voice throughout the call is sincere, focused, and action-oriented.  Closing remark reflects that as well.

Please feel free to add your best actions to this list in the comments field below.

---

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers customer care and customer service workshops, webinars, and DVDs globally. Her intuition and experience with people is a valuable resource to your business success. Read what other customers say about her results – click “endorsements” on this site.