Advice from a Call Center Geek!
Advice from a Call Center Geek is a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center and contact center. Tom Laird, CEO of 600+ seat award-winning BPO, Expivia Interaction Marketing and Ai auto QA startup OttoQa, ICMI Top 25 Contact Center thought leader discusses topics such as call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and training while having fun doing it!
Advice from a Call Center Geek!
Calming Irate Customer Interactions: 5 Proven Techniques
In this episode of "Advice from a Call Center Geek," we dive into the challenging world of dealing with angry customers.
Discover five powerful, actionable techniques that can transform heated interactions into opportunities for building customer loyalty. Perfect for contact center managers and agents alike, this episode covers:
- The Empathy + Action Combo
- The Interruption Buster
- The Ownership Approach
- The Reframing Technique
- The Calm Questioning Method
Learn how to diffuse tension, regain control of the conversation, and turn frustrated customers into satisfied ones. Packed with real-world examples and practical tips, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to elevate their customer service game. Tune in to transform the way you handle difficult customer interactions!
Tom Laird’s 100% USA-based, AI-powered contact center. As the only outsourcing partner on the NICE CXone Customer Executive Council, Expivia is redefining what it means to be a CX tech partner. Learn more at expiviausa.com.
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Welcome back everybody to another episode of Advice from a Call Center Geek the call center and contact center podcast where we try to give you some actionable items. Take back in your contact center, improve the overall quality, improve the agent experience. Hopefully we can improve your customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO of Xpevia Interaction Marketing. We're about a 500, 600-seat contact center outsourcer located here in the U S of a. Also the CEO and founder of auto QA, where we're fully automating contact center quality assurance scoring using AI. I think this is episode 226, which is pretty awesome. Started way back in 2018.
Speaker 1:Quick ask for anybody again, love for you to follow the podcast, but if there's any reviews, especially if you're listening on Spotify, on Google or especially on iTunes. We haven't had any reviews for a little bit, so I'd love to if you guys have positive, negative, anything you want to say. Love to have you guys. You know, just kind of give me some of your thoughts. What do you like, what do you not like? Love to get some feedback from some of you guys, but we've been so focused on technology, on AI, that again I want to get away from it a little bit and kind of, I think in a weird way, talk about what we need to do to kind of survive the kind of the context that needs to survive kind of this AI world right, and what is AI not great at right? It's not great at dealing with irate customers, it's not great at empathy. You know there's a lot of kind of you can tell the kind of fakeness of it. So I think one of the things, especially for us being a USA contact center we are a little bit more expensive than anything near shore offshore we have to have really good techniques to deal with different customer scenarios right, dealing with that irate customer that calls in and happens, you know, not as much as you would think. Most of it if somebody goes irate, it's probably happening actually on the call and it was an agent mistake. That's something that we've, you know, seen throughout all of our consulting and working with a lot of contact centers. So I want to give you kind of five techniques to utilize in your contact center to train with your agents. These are my five favorite.
Speaker 1:We always talk to kind of our frontline supervisors on kind of getting some of their ideas. So these five have kind of I think three of them have come from supervisors actually in our team. I think two of them are mine that I've kind of always kind of. I think three of them have come from supervisors actually in our team. I think two of them are mine that I've kind of always kind of brought up with the first one and kind of the last one. But I think, you know, these are things that we talk with our agents through.
Speaker 1:These are kind of some of the tools that we're giving our agents right so that they can deal with, you know, somebody who's maybe not being a jerk right, but just is not happy and is maybe taking it out on the agent right. The first thing and I think everybody kind of knows this and we kind of talked this through is you know the customer is not mad at you, right. If you're the agent right, you have to have kind of this kind of Teflon shield that understands they're mad about the situation that they're in, right, and so your job is to try to help them through that. And I think the cool thing about I don't go say the cool thing about an IRA customer, one of the unique things about having dealing with an IRA or really angry customers that there's a huge opportunity there to gain loyalty right. If you handle that well and we all know the best customer support agents right, they can turn these really difficult customers into almost raving fans at the end, like I see it all the time here at Expedia, we have just some people that have been here so long, they do such a good job with it and that's almost worth more than kind of the customer. That's just kind of calling in and you handle their situation. But when you have that, you know that really irate customer and you totally turn them around. You know there's a little bit of loyalty that I think kicks in with the company because, wow, they have somebody here that is really willing to help me and obviously from a support standpoint that's going to help.
Speaker 1:So let's get into some of these. There are no particular orders, so it's not like one is better than five. They're all kind of different scenarios depending on what is happening with the customer, what is happening with the car, and let me say this, to live on Facebook, live on TikTok, live on LinkedIn. So if you have any questions, if you disagree with me, if you have something you want to add, I will. Anybody who comments that has something worthwhile. You know we'd love to talk with you. And again, any questions, any comments, please shoot them out and I promise you I will get to them. If there's anything, that's cool, all right.
Speaker 1:So the first one I kind of call it the empathy bridge, right, I'm a huge realistic empathy guy, but I think empathy is the most overused and way to tick off customers with fake empathy, right, that's the tool that can be the best or the worst, right? We call it false hustle, right the whole. I'm really sorry to hear that, mrs Smith. That kind of thing where you're just kind of going through the motions, you know that can almost make a customer a little bit more right, that scripted empathy, right. So you know we want to do things of not just show empathy but then bridge it right to an action, right, how are we going to look to fix this customer? And I have a bunch of I wrote down a bunch of examples here too. So if you see me kind of reading or looking off, that's kind of what I'm doing because I want to make this kind of as actionable as possible.
Speaker 1:So again, taking that empathy that you are, oh my gosh, I can't believe this happened to you, right. But then, hey, this is what we're going to do now. Right, that does a really good job of kind of de-escalating, because you're not just kind of saying you're sorry, but you're giving kind of an option to the customer to say, hey, listen, if you kind of roll with me here, we're going to get through this and I'm going to be able to help you. So, again, expressing empathy for the customer situation, immediately following up with an action. So, again, like if the customer says, you know, hey, you know I've been overcharged for the last three months. Nobody seems to care. And then, you know, the agent can be like you know, mrs Smith, I can hear the frustration in your voice. I'm sure that these overcharges are something that I can look at. First, let me pull up your account. Second, you know, we'll take a look at those charges and if there's anything that I can do, it'll be three to five business days and we'll be able to get them taken off.
Speaker 1:Right, but again, let's start with the process. You know, can I have your name? Blah, blah, blah, right, and kind of going through that. That's pretty obvious. Right, that's not, like, you know, rocket science, but we still don't do that. Right, we've scripted our agents to do so many dumb things, right, that we've kind of taken away some of the humanness of this and trying to get the humanness back to the customer experience Again.
Speaker 1:So that bridge empathy, I love it. It's one of the best ways right, making sure you're going right into how you're going to help the customer after you kind of give a legitimate and a human empathetic statement that actually correlates. And if you're using the same empathetic statement for every single one, that's not human, that's a robot, right. So let's make sure that we're not just saying I'm really sorry to hear that, oh my gosh, I feel so bad for you, like all of those things. Like actually talk, like you're talking to one of your friends, right, and then boom, you can then roll into how do you help? All right. The next one Now, this is a different technique and some people may disagree with this. The next one Now, this is a different technique and some people may disagree with this.
Speaker 1:But if you've been in the customer support industry and if you've taken calls, you know that customer that just is hammering you, right, but they keep saying the same thing over and over and over again, right, they're kind of not really progressing. They're just venting Right, just venting right. So you know, we have a technique called the interruption buster, right, and what we'll do is we'll let the customer who's kind of going off on a tangent, we'll let them vent for, you know, 60 to 90 seconds, right, let them get it all out, right, and most of the time that's kind of how we start all this, right, we're actively listening and the customer's going on. But once we see this goes on for a minute, 45 seconds, they keep repeating themselves. Right, we're going to gently interrupt them, which normally you would never talk over a customer, right? And I'm not saying you're like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, right, we're not saying that, but just like, kind of, as we go to this 45 seconds, you know, and just think about, like the customer that she's just you know, or he's just you know, hammering you and just saying the same thing over and over and same thing over and over, and just be like hey, mr Johnson, mr Johnson, mr Johnson, hey, I don't mean to interrupt you, right, but but I, I totally hear what you're saying, I understand exactly what you're saying. So here's the problem that you do to make sure I can help you as efficiently as possible. Can I just ask you a couple quick questions and let's start the process of getting this fixed right?
Speaker 1:So, again, that interruption kind of it almost shakes them. If you're doing it appropriately, they then think you're going to say something like dumb, right. They think that you're going to be like you'll come at them or be mad. But you're not right. What you're doing then is you're saying you're kind of shocked them into listening to you and then you're going to go down and be like I totally understand You're kind of using that empathetic statement. I hear you kind of reiterating what they've said and then get them on the process where you're back in control of the call right, and getting them to a resolution that is, you know, good for you, good for them. However, that's going to go right. I really like that right.
Speaker 1:It's not for every single call right. It's for specific types of calls that you know, when a customer just again, like we've said, they're going off, let them go off, but they're not moving the conversation right. So you need to take control of that situation. Take control of the call again, right, gently interrupt them but then reiterate that their feelings right and then get them on a path where they can kind of move on, really like that, but it's for a specific kind of situation or kind of role. I mean, all of these I really like, like I think all these are really great techniques to use. You know the third one we really like, like I think all of these are are are really great techniques to to use. You know the third one we call it kind of the ownership approach, right, and.
Speaker 1:But with most situations that happen when you have a, this is another kind of situation. When you have a customer that calls in that says I've called in, this is the fifth time, this is the fourth time, you know, you have not been able to help me. This company's terrible blah, blah, blah. When I hear that, that's when I kind of want to use the ownership approach, right, because their big hesitation now is that I'm not going to be able to help them, that I'm going to pass them off to somebody else, right, and you start to use I statements and again, I think I have a really good script for this, so let me just hear me out on this.
Speaker 1:So again, customers like this is the fifth time I've called, nobody's helping me, right? So, mr Johnson, I want you to know that I'm going to personally called. Nobody's helping me, right? So, mr Johnson, I want you to know that I'm going to personally personally take charge in reviewing this situation. I'm going to personally take this and try to get us to the end. You know, first, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you a couple of questions, right, and then I'm going to pull up your account, right, and then you and I together are going to kind of work this through. But I promise you you know, one way or another I'm going to get to that. We'll get to the bottom of this, right.
Speaker 1:That's a huge relief because their main you actively listen to their main issue, right, and again, their main issue used to be this problem with, maybe, the product or the service, but it's now. That's not their main issue. Their main issue is they need to be heard. They don't think they're being heard. They think they're being left out in the rain, right, and they don't know who's going to help them, because they've tried multiple times and they have failed. So again, there's other issues with that If that's happening in your call center for a different podcast.
Speaker 1:But if you're that agent, I think that's when you can kind of go into these, you know, go more into the I statements and make that customer feel like you are there, you are the one person right out of all of them that's going to come in and they're going to help. So, again, different situations for all of these, but I think that's a really cool kind of one for that Number four, number five, kind of the same, but I think they have a little bit of nuance, right? So again, we kind of call it the reframing technique, right? So you know, when a customer is like you know your company is terrible, you know I've been using the software for weeks, it absolutely stinks. And then you kind of reframe, right? So you heard they've been using this for weeks, right? So, hey, you know, mr Johnson, I understand you've been using our software for a couple of weeks. I guess it looks like there's some real issues here. So let's break this down. Right, you said it's the software. So you know what specifically are you having trouble with, right? So you kind of listen, listen.
Speaker 1:Again, most of this stuff is actively listening. We have trained not to go. I'm going to go off on a little bit of a Drew. Opinions on enterprise phone system, cisco versus Genesis. I promise you I will get to that. Let me get to these four and five. And that's a great question. Let me, I'll throw that at the end.
Speaker 1:So most of the number one skill in the contact center space that we don't really talk about is actively listening, right, did you actually listen to what the customer said? Right, most we have trained active listening out of um, out of the agent. We've given them and, and, and, even if you're not using a scripted response, you're basically telling them how to respond with empathetic statements. And then they pick these four out of a hat. We've trained the actual talking to a human being out. And when you actively listen in, here there's a software issue it's been for the last couple of weeks and you can then take just that little basic part and just reframe it. One. It shows that you're actively listening to the customer. They feel like, okay, they're being heard.
Speaker 1:And second of all, now you're back in the driver's seat, a lot of this is call control, right. When you let the customer just kind of go and go and go and go, you lose control of the call and then the customer who's angry and kind of probably not totally in their I don't want to say right mind, but they're agitated, right, they could say things that maybe they don't always mean. Or if you kind of take that call control back right, there's a lot of things again that you can then calm that customer down. The last one I really like too this was mine too, and it's almost like you're Jedi mind tricking, right, jedi mind tricking a customer with I kind of call it the calm questioning method, where you just kind of come at them with a really soft voice and you start asking them a ton of questions, right, so you want to take them off, but again obviously relevant, like relevant to their problem. So you know, hey, to help me understand your situation, mr Johnson, I hear that you're irritated. Let me see how I can help you.
Speaker 1:I just got a couple quick questions, right, and if you can help me with this, I guarantee you I can help you with the problem that you're having right, and they'll say fine, go ahead. Right, you're like okay, when did you first notice this problem? Okay, three weeks ago. That was the problem. Okay, have you been receiving any error messages? Is there anything that we can look at with that? Okay, no, all, right, now, I noticed. You said that you already tried this to fix the problem. You turned it off and turned it back on, so I'm not gonna ask you that question.
Speaker 1:That was one of the things, but we can skip from there, right. And again, what are you doing? You're controlling the conversation, right. You're asking questions that you need to have answered, right, but maybe even asking some things that you don't need answered, just to kind of calm them down. I think that's a pretty cool technique. Again, calm questions. So you're using calm, measured questions that are relevant to the problem, getting them to kind of get off that they were mad, getting them on the track than that, all right, if I give this information, I'm going to get actually some help, and I think you know that's when you get at the end, like hey, I wasn't mad at you, right, I was mad at this and you've been amazing and you really helped me, right. That's kind of the end result that we're looking for.
Speaker 1:I think that's important. Let's just talk quickly about things that you learned you shouldn't do, right. So agents should never say they or we, right, we's okay, I'm sorry, like they, right, like talking about that, the company is separate from them, right? That instantly causes a lot of issues that kind of come up. We always want to be hey, we will. Mr Smith, we will really try and then use a lot of I statements. I'm going to really help you with this. You know, we want you to be happy. We don't want to be like you don't want to be like, well, yeah, that's what they've been doing, that's, that's their policy, right? Things like that are not good, right? So you don't want to do that.
Speaker 1:You know the whole interruption of a customer. I know we've kind of talked about that one use case. But it's OK if you let them go for a little bit. Right, it's OK if you, if you let them rant, but don't start to get irritated and talk over the customer. That will never end well and maybe it makes you feel good for that one half a split second, but it's never going to end where the customer is happy and then you're just going to get irritated, you're going to say probably something stupid. So it's kind of just keeping your demeanor understanding that there's Teflon around you. They're not mad at you, they actually need you to help them. And again, the really good customer service agents can kind of stay out of that kind of negative frame of reference.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I like is to try to kind of mirror how they're talking, right. So, again, if you have somebody who's a little bit slower I don't want to say slower, but I'll say older right, and they speak a little bit slower, right, you have to kind of mirror their issues and how they're talking with how you're talking, right. So if they're super, super slow and you're kind of going crazy fast, you know things don't always go well. So I think you know things don't always go well. So I think you know that the mirroring aspect is cool. And then the other thing is you know, if I had technique six, you know we would be talking about, kind of, you know, starting like whoa, mr Smith, I hear you, right? And then slowly lowering your voice, right, mr Smith? Nope, you know what I'm going to. We're going to take care of this right now. Let me just ask you some questions. I think we can get to the bottom of this. I can help you here. Right? So, starting your voice a little bit higher and then kind of just lowering it, you're meeting their energy and then you're lowering it, which then makes them lower their energy a lot of times. I think that's kind of number five and a half or six as a technique.
Speaker 1:The last thing that I will say is no customer service agent has to be berated. No customer service agent has to be sworn at If it gets to the point where a customer is just belligerent, right. There's a difference between being mad at a situation and then becoming personal, right, and saying things that are inappropriate, right. So for us and I tell all of our clients here in our outsource and it happens, I don't know once in two months, right, it almost never happens, right, and if it does, we'll make sure we have it all written up. But if somebody is so belligerent, so berating they're just swearing, right, then we will have our agent say Mr Smith, or Mrs Smith, listen, no one can be talked to that way. I'm here to help you. If you do continue that, I'm going to have to disconnect the call and then no one's going to be able to help you. So let's calm that down. If they're like, still go F yourself, you dumb, blah, blah, blah, then we actually will disconnect the call, right? No one deserves to be berated. No customer is worth, you know, having that done to you.
Speaker 1:So you know, I think it's extreme situations, right, and then again, that needs to be documented. People need to know, remember, everything that you do as a customer service agent is being recorded right. So you might as well just kind of use some of these techniques, try to make sure that you're you're putting your best foot forward with all these customers and I think you know a lot of good things can happen to you. And and again, most customers are pretty cool, like literally most of them. They, they, they really don't want to be calling in, right, so you know they want to get through this as quickly as possible. They understand where you guys are going. So, yeah, I think that you know there there's some things with that.
Speaker 1:So, again, if you guys have any questions on that, I really like this topic. I think, when we talk about actionable items to bring back into your contact center, this is a huge. This is a huge topic that not a lot of people are good at. They don't really know what to do with it. It's not educated and trained properly in the contact centers of what to do with irate people, depending on the different situations, and so, again, I think this is what makes us pretty cool here at Xpevia as well, right, we will, you know, go through a lot of this stuff with agents and ongoing training, to make sure that you know everything that we're doing is is good thanks. So again, if there's no more questions I'll ask. I'll answer some of these things that you guys had here.
Speaker 1:Um, so, opinions this is a question from drew opinions on enterprise phone systems, cisco versus genesis. Well, the first thing with cisco is they really don't have a cloud offering, right, most thing that Cisco has is on-prem. It's a little bit more difficult. It's a great platform, but I think, you know, they have been kind of moved ahead of with the nice, with the Genesis, with the five nine, just from the cloud aspect. Right, they're not really known for their cloud product. I think Genesis for me personally it goes Genesis or, I'm sorry, it goes nice CX one, and then I think it's Genesis and maybe just a hair back is five nine, right. And then we kind of talk about the dial pads, the talk desks, the U jets, kind of the Amazon connect, all of those.
Speaker 1:So if, if I was a customer, or if I was, if I was consulting for you, drew, and you said here's my two choices, we would talk about on-prem versus cloud. If you're going on-prem, I think that's crazy. I would tell you that Genesys is the better platform. Now they have more options when it comes to not just the ACD, but looking at workforce management analytics, getting into the AI space easier to do integrations with, and just the ACD but looking at workforce management analytics, getting into the AI space right, easier to do integrations with, and just the overall platform is easier to use when you know. Sometimes with Cisco you almost need to be a freaking genius right Programmer to kind of do it.
Speaker 1:Edwin, thanks, I know it's the big clock. I get comments on it all the time, so appreciate that. Yeah, and it doesn't work right now either. So it's just such a pain in the rear to change the battery and the battery goes pretty quickly. So, all right, guys, any other questions? Tiktok guys, linkedin I appreciate everybody kind of joining Again.
Speaker 1:I think I want to do more of these kind of things. I'm getting really kind of bored with the AI. Bored is not the right word, but overwhelmed with just completely talking about AI. There's only so much. You know where we are right now until we see another kind of huge breakthrough. You know I've done so many technology deals.
Speaker 1:Oh, sorry, drew, he's a Cisco guy, but again, I don't think there's any bad platforms out there. Right, it's just what is the use case for you? What do you need it for? But I would just say, everybody, you got to go to the cloud. I would never, ever, ever, get an on-prem solution, especially as you're moving kind of to this AI space. But again, thanks guys. I guess that's it. No more questions. I appreciate everybody. Hopefully this was helpful. We'll be on next week again. Any topics, anything that you guys want to hear, we have a. You know I've got a couple of things I want to speak about, but if there's anything that I can help you or add value to you, please, you know, hook me up, dm me, let me know. And again, if you need to just even have a one-on-one talk, we can talk. Or if you want me to do an episode on some larger topic, love to help you guys as well. Thank you everybody. Have a good one.
