When it comes to training your team to take inbound calls, there are a few important things to make sure you address. The essential pieces to cover are the two main building blocks of excellent customer service: knowledge of the business and/or products and adequate customer service training.
Teach the Importance of the Customer Experience
The customer experience should be the main focus when dealing with inbound calls. Making sure that the customer has a pleasant experience that gets their problems solved or their complaints heard is the ultimate goal. By training your team on the following points, your team’s ability to successfully handle inbound calls will rapidly increase.
How to Handle Complaints
If you’re dealing with inbound calls, it’s very likely that you will meet with your fair share of irate customers. The key to dealing with an upset customer is patience and understanding. Make the customer feel like they are being heard and show that you genuinely want to help them find a solution. And remember, the customer is always right.
How to Overcome Objections
There will be occasions where a customer does not like the solution that you have given them. Try to dig deeper into their problem and see if there is another, better solution that you can offer them. If you continue to be patient with the caller, you are more likely to find a happy medium.
How to Take Control of Calls
Don’t just wait for the customer to tell you what to do. Anticipate their needs so that you already have an answer to their next question before they even ask it. This will allow you to take control of the direction that the call is going while making the customer feel comfortable and taken care of at all times.
Why They Should Never Interrupt
Always let the customer complete their sentence, even if that sentence is a complaint. Interrupting a customer can show impatience and annoyance. Anticipating the needs of the customer is not the same thing as interrupting their thoughts. Knowing the difference between the two is important for successful inbound call handling.
Remember to Smile
Even though you may not be in front of your customer, it is easy to pick up on the disinterest in an employee’s voice. Maintaining a cheerful disposition even when dealing with customers over the phone plays a big role in providing a pleasant customer experience.
The steps listed above are great stepping stones for training. However, keep in mind that there are many other elements of customer service that play into handling inbound calls. If you need more ideas, use the internet to your advantage to find even more important tips for handling inbound calls!
Train for Success
Along with having the right attitude, it is important that your team has a good understanding of the ins and outs of the business and products so that they are well prepared to answer any questions they are confronted with.
This knowledge will come from a mix of training and providing them with the right tools. Making sure that your team is trained in the following areas will ensure that they are prepared to handle inbound calls.
Phone System
One of the first things you should focus on in your training is making sure your team knows how to utilize the phone system. It may seem like a common sense thing, but every setup is different and it’s important to make sure everyone is clear about how to use your particular system. Without this knowledge, handling inbound calls will be difficult.
Business and Products
Nothing makes a customer more impatient or upset than dealing with a representative that doesn’t seem to have an answer for any of their questions. Your team should avoid transferring customers whenever possible. Making sure that your team is well versed in any and all areas regarding your product or service is the key to quickly and satisfactorily handling inbound calls.
Simulations
After spending days teaching your team all of the textbook basics, it is essential that they are also given the chance to apply the things that they’ve learned. Simulate a real call by setting up your team with possible situations they could face and let them practice the new things that they have learned.
Real Life Examples
Hypothetical examples and situations are a great start, but will not adequately prepare your team to handle real life situations. Give your team the chance to shadow a trained caller and let them experience real life examples of ways to handle certain situations. This method of immersive learning will allow your team to be prepared to handle any type of inbound call.
Never Stop Training
In reality, no one can ever be 100% prepared to handle every possible scenario of an inbound call. There will always be room to improve your inbound calls as well. The best way to make sure that your team is prepared to handle an inbound call is by making sure that you continue to train them throughout their tenure, not just until the training period is over.
Preparing your team to become experts at handling inbound calls isn’t as difficult as it may seem. The best way to make sure your team is prepared is by providing them in-depth, extensive, continued training from day one to day 100 (and on!). With a fully trained team you can focus your attention on other important things like call tracking metrics.