How many words does it take for you to determine if the customer on the other end of the line is in a bad mood? One? Maybe two? You hear your customer’s voice and you can’t help but start to pass judgment on cranky old Mr. Miller. After the conversation is over, you turn to your co-worker and say, “You won’t believe the jerk I just spoke with!” Your teammate nods her head and smiles as she says, “Wait until I tell you about mine!” Before you know it, everyone is talking about their customer as that jerk or that idiot that needs to get some manners.
How many words do you need to utter before your customer concludes that you will be happy to help or that you will be difficult to work with? The way you answer the phone really does set the stage for what happens next. You can disarm a cranky customer with a cheerful voice and turn around someone who is having a bad day. A “can do” attitude is contagious.
When I speak to groups I like to play audio recordings that represent typical customer conversations. I ask the audience to Telepict what the customer service representative looks like, what the company is like and whether they would give that company their money. The concept of associating a face to a phone voice is what Tooty calls Telepicting and the way a customer Telepicts customer service matters.
You may not have thought about it, but the most common phone voice is one that is monotone. A monotone voice is flat, boring and uninteresting. A person with a monotone voice is often Telepicted as uncaring, stressed out and prone to mistakes. Most people have ups and downs in their day. Maybe you aren’t a morning person, or after you have lunch you feel sleepy. For the sake of conversation, let’s say that you have just one hour a day where your voice sounds monotone. One hour a day where someone may perceive you to be uncaring, stressed out and prone to mistakes. How many people do you talk to within an hour? Let’s multiply this by the number of CSRs and sales people you have talking to customers each day. Multiply that number by 5 work days in a week. You are potentially having a negative impact on hundreds of new and existing customers each week because you didn’t think a person’s voice was that important. Think again.
What can you do to improve your company Telepicture?
1) Don’t hire people with bad voices to work in customer service.
2) Use one of the best voices you can find as an auditory example for your CSRs to imitate. It can be the person who has the best voice in your office or you can use this month’s audio for call of the month or CSR star. Play the person’s greeting and have the other CSRs try to imitate it. Give a prize to the one who not only sounds most like the example, but who is able to use that voice the most during the day.
3) Instead of ending your greeting with, “How may I help you”, try using, “How may I help you today?” The word today sounds friendlier, especially when you add some enthusiasm to it.
Remember, you need to be in the game for every call. Customers are won and lost based on how you look over the phone.