How to Improve Active Listening for Call Center Agents

active listening is super important for call center agents because it clarifies confusions it resolves conflicts and most importantly it helps you build rapport which improves your chances of getting high survey scores and a performance bonus let me ask you a question if you can speak and understand a language does that mean that you're automatically capable of active listening yes or no unfortunately no and that's because active listening is not only about the verbal communication or learning the language it's also about understanding the nonverbal communication [Music] nonverbal communication according to wikipedia is the transmission of messages

or signals through a non-verbal platform such as eye contact facial expressions gestures posture body language but let's not talk about these things today because all these things right here they are relevant in face-to-face job interviews face-to-face interactions but today i'm only going to talk about phone conversations with your customers so we're going to talk about this in a separate video but today we're going to focus on the set of nonverbal cues that is relevant in phone conversations and that is called the para language now what the heck is paralanguage paralanguage means the nonverbal elements of

speech used to modify meaning and convey emotion it includes peace pitch volume and intonation in short you need to pay attention to your customer's tone of voice and no i'm not just talking about the words that she's saying but how she's saying them that is paralanguage examples of pear language are gasping laughing [Laughter] crying clearing of throat paralanguage is also happening every time you emphasize certain words for example there's a sale tomorrow versus there's a sale tomorrow so here sale is the emphasized word and here is tomorrow so here it sounds like you're excited about

the sale because you're emphasizing the word sale but here it sounds like there's a sale tomorrow why are you shopping now the same words but the meaning changes because of the different word emphasis that right there is a para language happening [Music] now let's talk about the nonverbal cues that you usually hear in phone conversations when talking to your customers let's start with sighing now i want you to listen to this mock call and try to guess what the customer is feeling why do you need my account number i already gave you my name for

security purposes every time we're about to disclose information about our customers we need to confirm that the caller is the owner of the account fine 7384897c a sigh usually means that your customer is tired or frustrated or impatient or annoyed and in this particular mock call the customer is impatient and annoyed and now by understanding these nonverbal cues you would already know how to proceed so by knowing that your customer is impatient and annoyed you would try to speed it up you would try to use as less words as possible and you would try to

avoid small talks unless she initiates it and this my friend is how active listening helps you now second example may i ask you to check if the usb is properly connected to your laptop i can't i don't know anything about this i need a technician i can't i don't know anything about this i need a technician as you heard two different customers who said the exact same thing but there's a huge difference because the first one was shouting and the second one was hesitant based on what you just heard to whom would you send the

technician first to the shouting customer or to the hesitant one who do you think has no more patience left to spare just ignore the company policy for now ignore the requirements first dispatching a technician just base your answer on the nonverbal communication of these two customers who do you think would you send the technician to sooner and i think you would all agree that you would send the technician sooner to the shouting customer and that's because it's easier to reason with the hazard customer you can still assure her that you're gonna help her but with

the angry customer good luck with that [Music] now let's talk about the non-lexical conversational sounds another fancy word what the heck does this mean basically for the lack of a better term these are words in english that are gibberish they don't have particular meaning in a way that a a regular english english word would have but when they're used in conversations they're usually used to convey emotion to signal recognition or signal comprehension for example when you want to non-verbally tell your customer that you're listening without saying i'm listening you would usually say this is the

equivalent of nodding but since you're talking over the phone then you instead say this tells your customer non-verbally to go on i'm listening another example of this is if you want to convey recognition you say oh or ah or ah or if you want to show that you're thinking you can say hmm a prolonged version of this would sound like hmm now that now means like you're suspicious or you're saying hmm something is fishy and when you're confused you say now if these sound a little informal to you you can instead use the following you

can say yes or i hear you exactly okay got it copy wow can i talk to you about shipment yeah sure how may i help you today so last month i ordered a set of roller blades for my boyfriend i wanted to be shipped directly to him so i didn't enter my address i entered his now according to your website shipping only takes seven days right right but see a week has passed and still no rollerblades the tracking number says delivery to mailbox but i thought hmm there's no way that that would have fitted his

mailbox that thing's huge yes it is but still i asked him to check the mailbox because you know you never know well he did find something in the mailbox but it was not the rollerblades oh you know what he got he got a note from usps saying that he has a parcel and that he has to pick up the parcel himself he has to go to the post office and pick it up himself like yeah how is that even possible is that normal oh i see what you mean use these non-lexical sounds to your advantage

when dealing with your customers or if a customer uses these sounds it could signal an emotional state and if you figure out what emotion that is it could give you an insight on how to proceed now pay attention to the pace and pitch of these two customers you're sending me the replacement for the broken plates right yes we are also for the inconvenience we're giving you a thirty dollar voucher oh really thirty dollars wow thank you i'm so happy you're sending me the replacement for the broken plates right yes we are also for the inconvenience

we're giving you a thirty dollar voucher oh really thirty dollars wow thank you i am so happy with the first customer you can just sense that she's genuinely happy with the 30 voucher um her pitch was high her pace was fast and you can just hear this smiling happy voice oh really thirty dollars wow thank you i'm so happy but with the second customer do you really believe that she's happy about the thirty dollar voucher listen again oh really thirty dollars wow thank you i am so happy first she changed her voice from normal to

mocking if you heard she said oh really thirty dollars wow thank you i'm so happy when before it was you will send me the replacement of it was just normal before but when she heard their dollar discount she immediately changed her voice her pitch was almost flat and her pace was intentionally slow all of these are common indications that someone is being sarcastic in this context in this mock call that she probably thought that thirty dollars is a very small compensation for her inconvenience so you see active listening is not just listening and taking the

verbal message at face value no it's also about understanding the undertone of the message the nonverbal communication the nonverbal cues the good thing is for the majority of humans picking up on these nonverbal cues comes naturally you know we're humans built inside our brains are mirror neurons these neurons enable us to understand what other people are feeling enable us to put ourselves in other people's shoes and understand exactly what they're feeling but if you want to get better at it i recommend that you listen to audiobooks specifically audiobooks for novels because these audiobooks are usually

filled with emotions and subtleties you will hear the subtleties in the voice depending on the emotion that the narrator wants to convey but just by knowing that nonverbal cues matter a lot when active listening it will already help you improve your active listening [Music] when a customer talks for a long time and you can barely remember what she said this is so common for newbies but over time you're gonna get used to it if you are in this stage i suggest that you keep a notepad open while your customer is talking you type in keywords

that will help you remember what she just said for example she lost an item you can write lost item once replacement before monday and then you just ask yourself now that i understand what the customer wants what is step one what is step two what is step three until you get to the resolution [Music] and another part of active listening is responding it doesn't matter if you understand the verbal cues or the nonverbal cues if you don't respond appropriately then it's all going to go to waste your customer is not going to know that you're

actively listening so how do you respond to show that you're actively listening it really depends on your customers issue and question for example you want to clarify something you still need information then what you have to do here is to ask questions you have to ask questions on parts that you don't understand and hopefully that question is a productive one what i mean by a productive question is a question that hasn't been answered by the customer yet that is why it is important that you take notes if you have problems retaining information because this will

help you not ask the customer to repeat herself because then that would no longer be active listening or if your customer is just unloading her frustrations her emotions then you have to empathize you can either apologize if it's your company's fault or acknowledge what she's going through you can just say this is frustrating for you i understand this is a great way to build rapport and to know that her pain is also your pain or if the customer is just making small talk she doesn't really have a complicated problem or she's not really frustrated she's

just she's just making small talk then active listening requires that you also acknowledge her small talk the good thing is not all customers love to small talk it's probably just going to be five percent every day so it's not like something that you have to do every single time and i understand it's hard because small talk for me is something that doesn't come naturally so i'm gonna talk about that in a separate video all right that's all for today and if you have any questions comment down below bye