#1 way to minimise customer complaints during COVID-19

It’s early April 2020 and businesses from Ballarat to Bendigo, Geelong to Gippsland and Melbourne to Mildura are adapting what they do so they can survive the impact of COVID-19. One strategy is setting up the business to allow customer service staff to work from home.

During this time, the good old telephone is going to make a big come back; customers will be phoning for help and staff will be reaching out to provide updates and support.

From speaking to Business Managers/owners at the end of March, I know that they and their customer service staff are eager to communicate with their customers and using the telephone is great way to do that BUT, if staff aren’t aware of 1 thing when talking on the phone, both customers and staff could be left feeling negative and negative customers complain.

The #1 way to communicate empathy, support and respect over the phone is through TONE.

To use your tone of voice effectively over the phone, use the four Es: be expressive, enunciate clearly, engage with customers and energise your voice.

Expressive

Use your voice to vary the tone, pitch and rate of what you say to make it interesting to hear – and make it clear you’re interested in your customers.

Enunciate

Use clear enunciation and master articulation. We can be casual when speaking with friends or family – dropping a final consonant, like the ‘g’ in a word with an ‘ing’ ending, for example, or truncating the middle letters of a word. Unfortunately, when we do that on the telephone, the sound of these shortcuts gets exaggerated. Open your mouth and speak clearly.

Engage

Your voice should be smooth and pleasant, not whining or complaining. Communicate that you are happy in your work (and a happy person overall) in order to engage your caller. Speaking in anger or being curt will put your call – and the business – in a negative light.

Energise

Your voice needs to really shine when you use the telephone as your instrument. You need to feel energy and pass that positive flow through to your callers. This means that you approach your job as if it is the only thing that matters right now, and that the caller you currently have on the line is the most important caller ever.

Although it might sound corny and may feel uncomfortable, ask staff to think about people they enjoy talking to over the phone, and then harness that feeling to help inject energy and joy into their customer conversations.

At times, your staff may need some help to remain positive and keep that positivity alive in their voice.

My tip: Before staff communicate via the phone, ask them to take a moment to self asess. If they are feeling anything less than positive, tell them to stand and smile. Standing opens up the diaphragm so we instantly sound better and standing also minimises the chance of being distracted by things on the desk or computer screen. Smiling turns up the corners of the mouth which in turn, improves the positive quality of our tone of voice.

If your customer service staff are working from home and need a brush up of their ‘telephone voice’, get your business into our online resource centre - The Service Excellence Zone.

By Cate Schreck - Author of The A-Z of Service Excellence - download the first chapter for free.