Why are some advisors effective and some less so? Let's unlock that mystery!
In this episode Jeremy Blake and Bob Morrell show you how important and flexible the voice is – and how you should be using it. In the first part of our special double-feature, we're laying down five key tips that will make your voice the secret weapon of your call centre.
Explore the nuances of tone with us as we analyse how a simple change in inflection can turn a customer's frown upside down. Plus, we'll tackle the underrated skill of active listening—because sometimes, the best way to be heard is to listen.
Join our conversation and let's transform your vocal game into the heart and soul of your contact centre's success. Jeremy and Bob are here to guide you through, and we promise, by the end of this episode, you'll be wielding your voice with the finesse of a maestro.
Look out for Part 2 – coming soon!
Find more useful and essential contact centre development from realitytraining.com
Why are some advisors effective and some less so? Let's unlock that mystery!
In this episode Jeremy Blake and Bob Morrell show you how important and flexible the voice is – and how you should be using it. In the first part of our special double-feature, we're laying down five key tips that will make your voice the secret weapon of your call centre.
Explore the nuances of tone with us as we analyse how a simple change in inflection can turn a customer's frown upside down. Plus, we'll tackle the underrated skill of active listening—because sometimes, the best way to be heard is to listen.
Join our conversation and let's transform your vocal game into the heart and soul of your contact centre's success. Jeremy and Bob are here to guide you through, and we promise, by the end of this episode, you'll be wielding your voice with the finesse of a maestro.
Look out for Part 2 – coming soon!
Find more useful and essential contact centre development from realitytraining.com
Speaker 1:
Contact Center Focus the reality training podcast.
Speaker 2:
Hi, you're listening to Contact Center Focus with Jeremy Blake and Bob Morell and we have a two-parter for you. We're kicking off today with part one. Jeremy loves a trilogy, but we haven't got a trilogy this time, but maybe we will have. So what is it we're going to help our CCFers with over the course of these two episodes?
Speaker 1:
So if you work in a call center, you are almost certainly using your voice. Of course, you could be doing web chat and emails and other things as well, but your voice is really, really important, and we spend a lot of our time working on what people say and the structures and the models that they use to become effective in their contact centers. And so what we've done is come up with 10 different tips about the voice, about how we can improve the voice that you use. It's your tool, it's your communication facility that's going to help you be productive and successful over the phone. So we've got 10 different tips to give you. We're going to give you five on this podcast and five on the next one.
Speaker 2:
We are very much believing what John Farnham said, which is you're the voice. You've got to try and understand it. Now, if you're listening to this and going, who's John Farnham?
Speaker 1:
Yes, I don't know who he is, your manager, if they're in their fifties.
Speaker 2:
Remembers you're the voice. Try and understand it.
Speaker 1:
What was he in, Jay? What band was it? No, that is the name.
Speaker 2:
You're the voice, try and understand it.
Speaker 1:
He must have had loads of hits after that.
Speaker 2:
Oh, they just kept coming, did they? Yeah, he hasn't stopped touring.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I don't think he had another single hit, did he I?
Speaker 2:
don't know if John Farnham did I mean the fact I was saying John Farnham, you're asking which band. If you're listening, john, and you're running a contact centre, it's a good hit.
Speaker 2:
So I'm going to kick off with tone. Tone, now, how you sound, before we even get into what you say, is arguably more important than the words that follow. So tone is the tone of voice Very easy to tune into this. And you're thinking what is tone? Let's just take you back to a domestic argument you've had. Don't you use that tone of voice with me Means? You might have been sarcastic, you might have been bored, you might have sounded lazy. In fact, we have one of those in the Blake household this morning. Somebody's tone about the state of their room was that they didn't care. Now human beings pick up on tone and because we're tuning in on the phone, we are listening intently to how you sound and we start to make conscious or subconscious decisions about you. Are they bored? They might listen to their voices croaky. So tone is essential. You want to make your tone consistent with the content that you are transmitting. It's as simple as that, folks.
Speaker 1:
CCF is brought to you by Reality Training. Our theatrical and entertaining approach to training means you and your people will change and improve what you do quickly and consistently. Please contact us about change projects and new sales and service models. Go to realitytrainingcom.
Speaker 2:
Bobby, what else should we consider with voice?
Speaker 1:
So this isn't necessarily a sound, this is an action. This is listening, because quite often people don't listen effectively. Now, there's lots of ways of listening and we might do another podcast just on listening at another point, but active listening is really really important. When we say active listening, when your customers talking, you're encouraging them to keep going. So it's things like aha, yes, how, exactly, in what way? Tell me more. You want that customer to keep talking because all the time they're talking, the pressure is off you and you're listening for things that they're telling you that are going to help you connect your product or service. What order is they're saying? So listening is really important. And the only other thing I'll say about listening is because you hear lots of calls that are quite similar. Try not to pre-empt what people are saying by sort of cutting them off and go yep, yep, yep, no. Give them the time to speak and listen politely to what it is they're saying. You're going to get a much better result on that call further down the line there.
Speaker 2:
Number three is stress. Now, I'm not talking about cortisol raging around your brain and you feeling in a panic and full of anxiety. That's a different type of stress. I'm talking about words that you stress. One of the bits of drama school training that we had that was quite useful is stress the verbs. If you have a sentence to the customer about them breaking down and that they will be collected and they'll be transported to a safe environment where you can relax, you can see what I'm doing. I'm stressing the verbs. Don't worry, we will contact you and give you full information and then we'll come and collect you. We'll take you and your family. You can see what I'm doing here. So quite good to stress the words that have some meaning and some action, or just stress the words that have the most meaning for your customers, and you will not pay a penny. It's 100% guaranteed. But I don't have to stress every word or I would be horrible to listen to.
Speaker 1:
Well, here's where two years at Drama School for both of us is really starting to pay off at last.
Speaker 2:
At last.
Speaker 1:
At last, after 30 odd years, we're now starting to get some payback. The next one is inflection. So inflection is about ways that you use that, the way you say a word to convey humour or to convey empathy. So you've already heard it on this podcast, where we've taken the mickey out of each other gently. I talked about Drama School and I was being sarcastic about the time that we'd spent there and the value of it. Now there's all sorts of things you can do with inflection, because empathy is really important. So I understand how you feel that inflection doesn't sound like you're genuine at all. I understand how you're feeling. Now I'm inflecting that. I genuinely do understand it.
Speaker 1:
Humour is a different thing. If you're telling a joke, make sure it sounds like you're telling a joke, not like some statement that people can't quite understand whether you're being humourous or not. So inflection is really really important. Now let's be clear on this. Some people cannot tell a joke. If you're one of these people who always gets confused when you're telling a joke, that means your inflection is probably wrong and you might need to practice that joke a few times to get it right. Jeremy, over to you. What's the final one on this?
Speaker 2:
podcast. Well, final one on this episode. Number five is volume. Ah, volume, oh hello. You don't want to let him know that you love him too much. If you do that love, then he's just going to take advantage of you. I've played with my volume there, doing my impersonation of previous. Tv agony, art Denise Robinson.
Speaker 1:
That's brilliant.
Speaker 2:
But hopefully that's all you needed. You could see volume, so you vary your volume, so selected sentences stand out from the rest.
Speaker 1:
So, ladies and gents, just to summarise, we just talked about tone, listening, stress, inflection and volume On this podcast. We'll come back to you on the next one with five more vocal tips. We'll see you soon.