Let’s take two real-life scenarios of two call center agents – X and Y.
Here’s a glimpse into X’s routine:
X takes customer calls throughout the day. He’s eager to ensure that he mentions all the points he’s expected to, that he has stored in his mind. In an attempt to do this, he forgets to wish a friendly greeting in two or three of his calls.
Some of his calls are a miss because the customers are busy or engaged in some activity and don’t have the time to entertain a call at that point of time.
He misses out points in some of the calls since he’s trying to recollect them. This leads to X mumbling some points incoherently which the busy customers don’t make an effort to hear and disconnect.
His phone calls are also longer in duration since he takes some time to get to the point and the prospective customers fail to understand what he’s getting at or the purpose of the call.
Finally, many of his customers had put in some requests and asked him to follow up and get back to them on the same. With a large volume of new calls, he had forgotten to follow up on the existing issues of his customers.
The following month, X decides to create a call center script to streamline his process. He starts incorporating a sales call script he wrote in his free time. Things went well during the first few calls. However, some customers asked him some questions he hadn’t prepared for or those that weren’t in the script. Unable to give an answer, he hurriedly moves on to the next part of his telemarketing script ignoring the customer’s query. This led an increasing number of customers disconnecting the call to the lack of a clear answer.
Now let’s take a look at Y’s routine:
Y has a call center script ready before he starts taking any client calls. He also has a notepad and a pen in front of him to take notes.
He starts with a confident greeting before every call depending on the time of the day. Before starting with his purpose, he politely asks the customers if it’s a convenient time to speak to them or not.
Upon getting a positive reply, he moves on and quickly explains the reason why he’s calling. As the customer remains hooked with the various angles he presents with stats and examples, he keeps asking questions to see if they are with him or not.
Once their interest is piqued, they request certain additional info and ask him to give a call back with the information. He makes a note of this and gets back to them with the information the next day.
Several customers ask him a lot of questions in between, which he takes the time to answer and then gets back to the points mentioned in his telemarketing script.
The result?
Happy Customers. Happy Boss. Happy Y.
Getting it Right
Now that you’ve learnt about both X and Y’s routine, what can you gather from their individual experiences?
Clearly, there are things that X gets wrong which Y corrects which inevitably gets him better results with his customers.
So let’s understand what are the things that X fails to do:
- Failing to start with a friendly greeting
- Checking if it was a convenient time to talk or not
- Speaking in an incoherent manner
- Failing to explain the purpose of the call in the first few minutes
- Failing to follow up on the customer’s request
- Memorising the script and following it without any personalisation
All the areas where X failed were the ones which Y got right because of just one single piece of information – a call center script.
The Importance of a Call Center Script
Get this. As per a study, 75% of customers choose whether to continue doing business with a company or not simply based on their customer service interactions. Moreover, many customers will decide to go ahead with a company based on their initial phone interaction. That’s how important customer interactions are for your business.
This is where call scripts come in. A well-crafted call center script can help call center agents engage in personalised conversations with customers and offer real-time value to them.
Scripts have various uses.
For example, you can use a cold call script to get appointments or real estate cold calling scripts to reel in a potential buyer.. Again, you can use both outbound call center scripts as well as inbound call center scripts to maximize customer satisfaction rates.
Benefits of Call Scripts:
- Reducing human errors – Scripts can act as great reference tools to help agents when they’re stuck and redirect them to processes without fail
- Promoting consistency in customer interactions – Scripts help ensure that customers get a consistent response in-line with the brand language, no matter which agent they are speaking to.
- Offering confidence to call center agents – Scripts reduce the worry and anxiety to take the conversation forward and can help agents to stick to well-established processes when stuck.
- Helping to monitor call quality and performance – Based on the performance of agents, you can incorporate several best practices into the script reducing stress and increasing productivity.
- Integrating call scripting functions in IVR systems – Integrating your scripts into hosted IVR systems can help agents access customer information easily.
Call scripts are an indispensable part of call center operations. That’s why we at Expert Callers pay a lot of attention to developing the right scripts so that they match the unique requirements of each client and get the best results.
Tips on How to Create Effective Scripts to Ensure Positive Customer Interactions:
- Incorporate call recording inputs in call center scripts – Call recordings not only help in identifying problems and evaluating performance but also in fine tuning scripts based on call insights.
- Convince callers – You can also record positive responses from customers and include them in the script. When customers experience more positive interactions on a call, it will transform their overall impression of the brand.
- Understanding the requirements of the caller – Try to include the customer’s requirements at the beginning of the script. It’s also important to include any relevant information with regards to those requirements at the very beginning.
- Using auto-cognitive devices – Avoiding distractions during a call is extremely important in increasing the productivity of each call. Avoiding multiple calls at once, using different colour codes or highlights can help the agent to focus.
- User-friendliness – Making the scripts user friendly and easy to understand can go a long way in helping the agents to follow it easily and cover all the points in the process. A script doesn’t have to be a tongue twister. Keep it simple.
How to Create the Perfect Call Center Script:
- Decide on the purpose of the script – It’s important to remember why you’re creating the script in the first place. Don’t try to kill too many birds in one shot. Keep different agendas in different scripts.
- Incorporate scripts in agent training – While training call center agents, using real-life scenarios of scripts can help them to grasp the importance of the scripts and understand how to use them effectively.
- Train representatives to make customer service their top priority – Scripts can only help you to a certain extent. The attitude and sincerity of the agent towards resolving customer issues is of utmost importance. Scripts can then be catalysts to help achieve that goal.
- Ensure scripts are accurate – It’s also important to ensure that scripts don’t have wrong or inaccurate information since that’ll ruin the very purpose of the creating the scripts.
- Customer data should be on top – The script should prioritize getting customer data as the first step in any call. Before starting the process, the agent should first pull up the customer data from the system. This will help reduce any wait times and create a positive experience for the customer.
- Train for two-way communication – Training of call center agents should include how to talk with customers rather than talk to them. Short responses with more pauses to help the customer intervene is the ideal way. It’ll reduce call durations as well as resolve problems faster.
It’s important to remember that there is a person on the other end of the line and not a robot. So sticking to automated responses or strict scripts will take you further only so much. Personalising to meet unique customer needs and fulfil specific agendas can go a long way in creating effective customer interactions.
At Expert Callers, our aim is to secure a high success rate for customers. Thus, we have well-developed scripts to create a seamless customer interaction. Over time, our agents have perfected the art of creating personalised scripts and using them to get the best results for customers.
