4 Things Customer Service Agents Can Do to Convey Empathy to Customers
This is How to Move Calls to Closure
How to Acknowledge Customer Concern- and Why You Must
Do these three things to de-escalate immediately with customers
When You Correct a Customer, You Make Them Feel Dumb
Chat Handling Fundamentals
How to Ask Customers Questions
Make Sure You Don’t Push Your Customers Because They’ll Push Back
Instantly Sound Friendlier Over the Telephone – Speak in complete sentences
How to Politely Control Calls with the Chatty Cathy
How to De-escalate Angry or Agitated Customers
How to Instantly Make Emails and Chat More Personable
7 Phrases That Convey Empathy to Customers
7 Comebacks for the Customer Who Cusses at You
Now you can get even more training videos, phrases, and strategies for delivering the best customer experience when you sign up for Myra’s email list.
If you’ve enjoyed some of these videos, you might want to check out Myra’s customer service eLearning.
Myra’s customer service eLearning helps your employees speak with friendliness and empathy, and handle difficult customers with more ease – with progress reports, quizzes and SCORM option.
(I once delivered a keynote in an old movie theater in Muskogee, OK! For break we had movie popcorn and soft drinks. Talk about spicing up a training!)
I’m sipping hot apple cider and being blessed by a Christmas scented candle while I read over evaluations from my recent training event in Minneapolis.
I love reading what participants loved about my creative and engaging training methods. Truth be told, I get pretty much the exact same feedback from session to session. I know what works.
Today I want to share with you the top 7 things people say they love about my corporate training sessions. I have neatly packaged these tips into an article I call “7 Ways to Spice Up Your Training.”
7 Ways to Spice Up Your Corporate Training Sessions
1. Tell a story….If there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s my stories. I teach with stories. I engage my audience with stories. Every major point I make in a keynote or training session is made through story.
2. Show a YouTube clip….Make it relevant and if it can make participants laugh or cry, even better.
Put Yourself In Their Shoes – In my Empathy workshops, I show the powerful video below. This video exercise truly gets participants to feel for another person.
3. Get participants to fill in blanks….I have sections in my training workbooks where participants have to fill in blanks in order to capture the concept. This is extra engagement and content reinforcement.
4. Have participants teach part of the session…In my full-day sessions, I divide participants into small groups of 5 and each participant is given a short handout with a technique. I tell them to take up to 5 minutes to read their handout and prepare to “teach” the other members of their small group the fundamental ideas on their handout. Each participant is then given up to 3 minutes to teach their topic to their small group. (Self Teach-Back is powerful learning technique that gets the participants actively involved in the learning. Research shows that people recall 93% of what they teach to others.)
5. Conduct a demonstration….Steve Jobs always included a demonstration in his keynotes. If it worked for Steve, it can work for you. In my How to Handle Difficult Customers training, I demonstrate Aikido! My audiences love it!
6. Include technology…. Recently I assigned a case study to small groups. Participants had to use their smartphones, tablets or laptops to quickly conduct research to answer the questions from the case study. They loved that level of interactivity.
7. Direct participants to take notes….I realize this doesn’t sound exciting, but my clients love it. At least 3-4 times during my sessions I will say, “I want you to go to your note page and write down the 2 or 3 most important ideas you heard from this section.” This gets participants writing and it increases retention of your content.
Spice up your next corporate training session with one or more of these techniques. When you do, you’ll increase engagement, boost retention and you’ll be loved by your audiences.
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Reproducible comprehensive participant workbook that drives home key points and serves as a reference point long after the training is over.
High-impact PowerPoint slide deck that you can use as-is or customize with your logo and specific examples.
Detailed trainer’s notes to help you quickly get ready to train.
Certificate for free consultation with Myra Golden – Consult with Myra about the philosophy, objectives or delivery of this training program before you deliver it!
Delivered digitally so that you’ll have this entire training system at your fingertips in minutes!
How-to hints for delivering the very best training.
Now you can give your representatives even more great skills for delivering the best customer experience and for handling difficult customer situations. Sign up for my email list and learn specific tips, approaches and phrases to help your employees help your customers.
On Monday, I had the privilege of being the opening keynote speaker at the Insurance Consumer Affairs Exchange Conference (ICAE) in Newport Beach, CA.
As you know, much of what I teach is focused on how to most effectively deal with difficult customers.
So, for ICAE I designed and delivered a keynote (and workshop) on how to deal with extremely difficult customers. I call these customers collectively The Consumer Vigilante.
In my keynote, I explained that today’s consumers are impatient, savvy and relentless. Some customers, the consumer vigilantes, will stop at nothing.
I walked my audience through the toll difficult customs are taking on employees and organizations:
Extremely difficult customers are putting serious stress on employees. This stress is bringing down morale and inviting burnout.
Difficult customers cost companies money! The time it takes to deal with unhappy and extremely difficult customers is taking time away from your best customers and resulting in a poor customer experience because staff can’t deliver the best service to the best customers.
I shared thoughts, stories, perspectives and research to inspire my audience to take a more focused approach toward handling difficult customers. And then I offered a powerful solution to handling difficult customers, the consumer vigilantes of the world:
Verbal Aikido
My keynote was very well received. We laughed, engaged and learned 5 principles from Aikido for dealing more effectively with extremely difficult customers.
For the benefit of my wonderful ICAE audience and as a treat for my blog readers, I am posting my slide deck from the presentation. I also have a link to the videos I talked about in my keynote.
This is such a powerful video that truly gets participants to feel for another person.
And here’s the Jack Nicholson clip I talked about near the end of my keynote:
I actually feature this clip in my full-day customer service workshops. It gets hilarious laughter for sure, but after the clip we discuss how the waitress could have handled this customer better.
Watch the video, paying careful attention to the waitress. Note your first impression as she approaches Jack’s table, her facial expression, attitude, etc. Next, flip the script. What might she have done differently to have the situation end MUCH differently?
Enjoy!
The lesson here, of course, is to be flexible and friendly. These two attributes will take you a long way with customers, even the most difficult of customers.
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My family and I are enjoying a spring break get-away in Memphis. We came to visit the National Civil Rights Museum, the Slave Tavern and Beale Street. Yesterday my kids were in the mood for pizza and using my iPhone, I quickly found a cool-sounding pizza parlor online. The description said the parlor featured movies, books and famous pizza. We quickly pulled up the address on my husband’s iPhone and headed out for pizza. So quick in fact, that I didn’t take the time to read reviews, something I nearly always do.
We entered the pizza place in the middle of lunch time, yet no one was there. No customers, I mean. An employee emerged from the back and said, “Can I help Ya’ll?” Her body language was almost hostile. Her tone was defensive. I felt like we had accidentally barged in on a small family funeral. I said, “Are you open?” I felt I had to ask that because she came across like we were intruding and again, no customers were present. “Yeah, we’re open.” she said. Immediately, I wanted to leave because I didn’t like her attitude. We all felt so very unwelcome. In fact, I turned to my husband and suggested that we walk until we found something better. But my husband ushered us to a table. The lady that still stood near the kitchen didn’t walk us to a table. My husband did.
By now, I am uptight. Several minutes passed before the lady from the kitchen area came to our table. She said, “Would ya’ll want drinks or anything?” Seriously, would we want drinks or anything? I said, “Of course, we want drinks.” Yes, I had major attitude and my kids and husband feared I was about to embarrass them. “Well, what do ya’ll want?” Again, seriously?
The entire service experience was awful. I also noticed there were no books or movies as listed in the description. We paid $75 for below average food and shockingly bad service. As I sat there fuming, my husband began to read reviews on Yelp. The reviews were every bit as bad as the service we were experiencing. How could I have not read the reviews before choosing this place.
Two Lessons From My Experience
So, I have 2 lessons here. One, always read reviews on Yelp or a site you trust before choosing a restaurant you’re trying for the first time. Two, and this is really my point, be welcoming to customers.
Be Welcoming
First impressions set the tone for the customer’s experience. When you start out warm, friendly and welcoming, everything else will go very well, no matter what may happen later in the interaction. When your first impression is cold, defensive or in any way unwelcoming, everything will be perceived by your customer as negative, no matter how good things may truly be.
Starbucks employees are trained to “be welcoming” and that is why you are verbally greeted the moment you walk into a Starbucks store. QuickTrip, a super successful convenience store chain headquartered in Tulsa, greets every single customer upon entering the store. Every single customer gets a friendly and welcoming greeting when entering. Being welcoming means greeting customers immediately, putting a smile on your face, squarely facing customers and warmly welcoming customers into your place of business.
Being welcoming is not hard to do. It’s exactly what we all do when we open our front doors and welcome guests into our home. Be welcoming so that you get your customer experience off to the best possible start. Be welcoming so you don’t make your customers wish they hadn’t chosen you.
Now, I’m off to Yelp to post my review….
Now you can give your representatives even more great skills for delivering the best customer experience and for handling difficult customer situations. Sign up for my email list and learn specific tips, approaches and phrases to help your employees help your customers.
I’m about to reveal a hidden way for you to literally
convert “nightmare” customers into an almost endless source
of loyalty, goodwill and profits.
Simply put, you can use these insider secrets to instantly
turn angry customers into raving fans for you and your
company – without giving away the farm.
Amazing but true … and the best part is virtually nobody
knows about these techniques!
What I’m talking about is my “Stop Screaming At Me” online video training.
The biggest problem with the customer experience in most companies is how employees talk to customers. All too often, employees come across as indifferent, cold, uncaring, rushed or rude. This employee “attitude problem” can be the tipping point that sends customers to the competition. This attitude problem is what drives customers to tweet and blog about a poor customer experience.
The great news is, with the right training and strategy, employees can learn how to soften tones, truly convey empathy, make customers feel taken care of and even make memorable personal emotional connections with customers. Here are 5 tips to get you started on the right track for how to talk to your customers.
1. Acknowledge customer concern, when appropriate
This helps you convey empathy and compassion and it helps you make an emotional connection
▪ “I can understand how frustrating it is when _________”
▪ “I realize how complicated it is to …..”
▪ “I cannot imagine how upsetting it is to …..”
▪ “I know how confusing it must be when….”
2. Yield to customers
Be careful not to over talk or interrupt customers. Interrupting is perceived as rude. Three pointers for yielding to customers:
Allow customers to finish sentences
If you accidentally interrupt a caller, apologize
Even when you know within a second or two that the call will need to be transferred, allow the caller to finish their statement before making the transfer
Here’s a 2-minute video that you can show your employees if you notice a problem with interrupting or over talking customers
3. Try not to correct customers
Even when customers are wrong, it’s best not to correct them. Telling customers they are wrong can put them on the defensive and make interactions tense. If the matter over which the customer is wrong is not critical, try to let the little wrong slide.
4. Speak in complete sentences
When you speak in complete sentences you sound friendlier and “warmer”. Always speak in complete sentences with customers. Instead of saying, “Last name?” say “Can I please have your last name?”
Here’s a short video on the what and why of speaking in complete sentences
5. Pace your customer
Try to meet your customer where she is and pace her needs. If your customer is asking lots of questions, sounding confused or frustrated, or continues to ask for clarification, you have an opportunity to pace. You can pace this customer by taking the time to slowly cover every detail and by checking to ensure you are clear and understood. When speaking with a customer who sounds busy or savvy, you can pace this customer by getting right to the point and giving them what they need quickly and efficiently.
Now you can give your employees even more great skills for delivering the best customer experience. Sign up for my newsletter if you don’t get it already – and learn specific tips, approaches and phrases to help your employees deliver a delightful and friendly customer experience.
