How Emotional Intelligence Training Can Improve Your Call Center’s Customer Service

Written by KOVA Corp

Think for a moment about how important it is to see the person you’re talking to in order to understand what they’re trying to say. The look on their face or their body language can clue you into what they really mean, even if their words are telling you something different.

Now imagine sitting at a desk and listening to someone’s voice. What tools do you have to judge their emotional state other than their words and their tone of voice?

Understanding customers is a vital part of a successful call center, and sometimes it takes a little extra training to make sure an agent is able to gain that understanding.

That’s where Emotional Intelligence comes in. The textbook definition of Emotional Intelligence, or EI, is this: “The ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.”

And it’s immediately obvious why a concept like that could be vital to the success of a call center agent. The more you know about how to read or perceive a customer’s emotions, the better you’re going to be able to provide great customer service, thus satisfying the caller and the company your call center works for.

Good customer service at a call center is not just about dealing with calls in a timely manner and keeping up with documentation of the calls. It’s about making sure the customer’s issue was resolved. And to do that, an agent must consider the customer’s emotional state when speaking with them.

One of the typical first steps in EI training is to have agents think not about the customer’s voice, but how they themselves sound during a call. Does the agent have a harsh or ambivalent tone? Do they sound unsympathetic? That could be a turn-off immediately for anyone calling in with an issue.

Oftentimes in EI training, the next step is to have the employee go through some call simulations to examine their reactions, or even to speak into a mirror and take note of their tone, expression and body language. Keeping these things in mind when speaking with a customer can help the agent seem more sympathetic and lead to a greater level of understanding for the caller.

Another important part of EI training is teaching agents how to deal with stress or irritation without passing those emotions on to the caller. By talking about the science of what causes these reactions in the brain, agents can learn to better control them.

Once the science is a little clearer, EI trainers can move into strategies to respond to pressure, stress, tension and anxiety. By molding these strategies to an individual agent, a trainer can make certain that the goal of remaining calm, attentive and professional is within reach for every employee, regardless of the amount of experience they have at a call center.

EI also focuses on identifying patterns within an agent’s behavior than can either be nurtured for more effective performance or curbed before they cause a problem. The more ingrained the positive patterns become, the less likely an agent is to forget or disregard them.

The next step in the training process is all about judgment, and how to suspend it when speaking with a customer. Eliminating any sort of preexisting ideas about a caller or their situation is an excellent way for an agent to put themselves in the caller’s shoes, and that’s the point that a helpful dialogue between customer and agent can begin.

Once an agent has become skilled at reading and managing their own emotions, and doing so with their callers, it’s often a logical progression for them to begin coaching others in the call center on how to do so. This way, EI training can become a continuous cycle, with trained agents instructing others on how to step outside of their own experiences and patterns and learn to be more receptive and understanding to their callers.

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