How to Communicate with Customers

Today I had an interesting experience which reminded me of one of the very few reasons why I still work for someone else. I truly believe that these events help me further my knowledge of the way the customer thinks and reacts to various situations. After the events take place, I can draw conclusions and have only used one resource- time. Then again, I am getting paid for my time. And putting work in this perspective makes it a little bit more bearable to show up day after day.

The customer I spoke with today was extremely belligerent. It wasn’t even the fact that he was angry, but he was also irrational. Every attempt to answer his questions seemed to create ten more questions. He was not looking for a straight answer. This information allowed me to take a different approach to resolving his concerns. Rather than try to answer all of his questions, I simply picked out one. His strategy was to confuse me. Perhaps so that he could prove some non-existent point and take control of the conversation. None the less, I chose one of his questions at random. Once I thought up a good solution, I also thought of a few ways to state these to the customer. From this point, every time the customer tried to stray from the question I had chosen, I redirected him with a resolution. After I had repeated myself about five times, I gained control of the conversation and began to guide the customer.

Types of Communication
Phone customer service cannot be compared to face to face customer service. This is because people have restraints when they can see your face. In their mind they are bound by the same limits they have lived their entire life. Yelling is usually obsolete when speaking with a customer. Yes, it does happen, but it is of course much less frequent face to face.
When a customer speaks to you on the phone, visual cues and facial expressions vanish. You can no longer show remorse in your eyes, or empathize through you body language. You must rely solely on your voice to express yourself on the phone. From tonality to technique, it is all equally important when building rapport and communicating to the customer.
Speaking on the phone can be difficult for a lot of people. Most who have trouble never even build rapport with the customer. This can sometimes even end in a one sided yelling battle.

Fields of Study
I have always found NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and hypnosis beneficial when dealing with customers. Both offer techniques which allow me to build better connections with my customers. Even though this might seem like a waste of time, it actually does the opposite.

Rapport

Rapport is probably the most important field to my studies. Most companies which have phone based customer service will tell their employees to build rapport with their customers. They never really explain what it is exactly, but they know it does something good.

Pacing And Leading 

There are many methods for building rapport with another person. I have found a very valuable source by a man named Igor Ledochowski. He sells a product called,
Conversational Hypnosis

• Truthfully, the site doesn’t fully encompass everything the product actually teaches you.  Don’t let the site design fool you because the product is 100% quality.

which is well worth learning. There is a specific section which I spent a lot of time learning. A form of building rapport is called, “Pacing and Leading.” Igor basically defines pacing this as, “a mechanism to create smooth transitions in people’s thoughts- linguistic bridges.” This subject is also made up of its own techniques: Sensory pacing, Positive negation, Yes sets, Tag questions, Truisms, Unconscious pacing, and Echoing language.

Echoing Language

Echoing language is probably the easiest to grasp and immediately apply. You may have noticed in the past that if you are able to make a customer agree with you, they are much easier to handle. Echoing language is fundamentally repeating what is said back to the other person. You are reflecting language patterns and reflecting back experiences to the customer to get them to agree. In turn you are building rapport by doing this. For example, if a customer tells you, “I just had a lot of car trouble and I won’t be able to pay my bill until I get paid next Friday. I was hoping that I would be able to get an extension on my service until I can pay my bill.” If you said, “I’d be happy to help you with that. If I understand correctly, you just had car trouble and would like to get an extension until next Friday when you can pay your bill.” The customer will usually subconsciously agree with you. Even though it seems simple, most people over look it. Try concentrating on this next time you are having trouble building rapport with a customer and you will definitely see results.