Call scripts help agents feel prepared when customers call your brand for service. Providing guidelines that outline your company’s conversational style and call protocols can reduce agent stress and ensure a consistent experience for all customers regardless of whom they speak to. Here are six golden rules for creating call scripts that satisfy your customers’ needs while still providing a gentle human touch.
Every conversation should begin with a warm, friendly greeting. However, giving your agents choices will ensure that each response sounds natural—they should have the option to choose phrases that best suit their personalities. In this manner, customers will not have to hear the exact same words every time they call your company and will feel that their conversations are more personalized and spontaneous.
After the initial greeting, agents should ask how they might be of service. More importantly, they should invite customers to explain their issues. Agents should interject when they need to clarify information and to express their understanding as the customer speaks. The idea is to give customers a chance to share their feelings and provide information while keeping a conversational tone. Remember that customers must not be forced to share too much account information, as a good CRM solution should be able to provide basic customer data.
Dropped calls are a major source of frustration. Customers should always know when agents are simply listening or looking up information. Agents should inform customers about these pauses and let them know what they are doing specifically at that time, and they should give an estimated wait time if possible.
When an agent has a solution to propose, it’s important to make sure that the customer understands it. Agents should ask customers directly if they have any questions or if they are in any way unsatisfied with the solution offered. Make sure to give customers the chance to offer their opinions and have a voice in finding the solution.
There will be times when agents need to leave the call script aside and be more spontaneous. This may happen during a difficult case: a customer might be very upset, or perhaps finding a solution requires extra support from other agents or supervisors. When this happens, agents should remain calm and approach the customer intuitively. Training agents to better handle these situations is a great way to ensure that they will not feel overwhelmed when such scenarios arise.
To really know if your call scripts are successful, test them regularly. For example, consider using A/B testing to determine if one script is more pleasing to customers than another. Speech and text analytics may provide additional insights, and agents may also offer their own feedback. After all, they are the ones speaking to customers everyday and will have a deep understanding of what is expected from your brand.Call scripts are excellent guides for your customer service staff, but they have their limitations as well. By using them to empower your agents while allowing room for spontaneity, both your staff and customers will benefit from productive calls that lead to quick resolutions. To deliver the very best customer experiences, learn about Vocalcom, a global leader in AI-powered contact center software solutions and premium omnichannel customer interaction platform.
