Customer service is often a demanding job, not just physically but also mentally. You often have to deal with various customers with different needs and personalities. And all the pressure to serve them can take its toll on your emotional well-being. As such, you and your team need to build up your emotional intelligence for the job. Here is how you can do it and be more effective in caring for your customers.
The role of emotional intelligence in customer support
Emotional intelligence refers to a person’s ability to recognize and manage emotions. This includes both one’s own emotions and those of the people around them. The skill allows people to better interact with each other and achieve desirable results. As such, it has become an essential job skill for many positions. In the case of customer support, emotional intelligence plays several important roles.
Building relationships
A stronger company-customer relationship is vital for encouraging the latter to return and become a regular. Here, emotional intelligence helps build the needed connections. If your staff are aware of the customer’s emotions, they can adjust their services accordingly to suit those customers’ needs. This makes them feel more welcomed, leading them to patronize the service more.
Providing customer assistance
Another area of customer service where emotional intelligence plays a large role is in providing support. Here, your team should be ready to listen to customers’ concerns and empathize with their situation. The ability to understand customer pains also helps your support team better devise solutions. These solutions are the ones that bring the most satisfaction to those customers.
Fostering a more efficient customer support team
Image from ChatWire.
The concept of emotional intelligence also plays a role in improving the dynamics of your customer support team. When members are aware of each other\’s emotions, they become more capable of lending a hand and helping the team. This is vital, as it gives agents the confidence to face customers since they know that the team has their backs.
Boosting social perception
Emotional intelligence also has a surprising impact on how your business is perceived by the wider public. When you deliver an empathic service, customers are more likely to talk about that experience with their peers. That positive affection towards your brand will draw in more people who would want to experience the service as well.
Honing your customer service team’s emotional intelligence
Building the emotional intelligence of your customer support staff requires a considerable amount of effort. You want them to adopt the various practices to heart, allowing them to better call upon the relevant skills when dealing with specific customer support situations. For that, you would want to focus on several key areas.
Increasing emotional awareness
Improving emotional awareness begins with customer agents becoming more mindful of their emotional states. Teach your agents to take some time to determine their feelings at present. Are they feeling positive at the moment or do they have some negative emotions like stress and anger? Once they become aware of their emotional state, your agents will be able to better assess how they will face customers.
To help your team deal with negative emotions, teach them some simple calming exercises. These include breathing exercises that they can do while waiting for the next customer. Encourage them to make these exercises part of their daily routine or whenever they need to calm down.
Once they learn how to reign in their emotions, your support team would then be able to better manage customer emotions. An important aspect here is understanding which emotions play a large part in getting a good customer experience. Train your team to be more observant of the customer’s language, facial and body expressions, and other contextual cues. All of these will give them a clearer picture of what emotions they have to deal with and how they should respond.
Mastering the art of active listening.
One particular customer emotion that your team should be able to address is the need to be heard. Customers have this desire as a means of validating their concerns. On the other hand, responding to this need helps customer support have a good grasp of the customer’s situation. This lets them provide the most suitable solution.
This is where active listening comes in. Active listening involves getting and understanding not just of the facts the customer is presenting but also the way they deliver these. Here, your agents must be patient to hear all of the customer’s story. They also need to avoid pre-empting and interrupting the customer and just give them room to express all their thoughts.
After the customer is done telling their concerns, your customer service agents should follow through with a series of well-thought questions. The idea here is to get additional information that will help the team meet the customer\’s needs. Ask probing questions to guide the customers into better organizing and articulating their thoughts.
Providing a more emotional customer experience
The next stage in tapping emotional intelligence for customer service is getting your agents to evoke the positive emotions that you want to get from your customers. This requires a good amount of planning. You need to determine where in the customer journey each kind of emotion should appear.
For instance, maximum happiness should happen when customers finally buy your product or have their issues resolved. On the other hand, you would want to lessen the appearance of negative emotions like frustration, during points like customer support.
Your agents should also learn how to effectively bring out these emotions. Some of the strategies that they can explore are:
- Using clear and simple language: Agents must be able to explain everything unambiguously to help customers understand the options being offered.
- Exuding calmness: An agent that is calm and collected will more likely draw the attention of a customer, facilitating better back and forth communication.
- Using gentle assertions: When emphasizing a point to the customer, agents should speak in a firm but gentle tone to help them understand the importance of what is being said.
- Deflecting conflict with compassion: By showing customers that they are there to help, agents will be able to calm and encourage them to see the interaction in a more positive light.
These simple steps will help your team more effectively steer the customer towards making the desired action, like buying a product. For their part, the customer will feel more satisfied with their decisions since they get the emotional response they want from your team.
Tap into your customer support team\’s emotional intelligence
Taking advantage of emotional intelligence can do a lot of wonders for your business’ customer service efforts. Not only will your patrons be happy with the result of their transactions, they would also return with more would-be customers in tow. Use the strategies provided here and watch your business become more beloved by people.