We have all heard about how important empathy and active listening are in many areas of our lives and professions and for those who are employed as customer care agents in the largest and most complicated heavy industry of all, the automotive industry, with so many moving parts, it is particularly tricky.
The theme for EI Matters this month is recruitment so I felt it was apt that we take a closer look at how to empower our team members to motivate them to deliver and keep them engaged for as long as possible – a challenge for many businesses the world over.
In this article, I’ll share with you my experience of helping a team of multi-lingual customer care agents from this industry raise their game by leveraging some key aspects of human behaviour and psychology. These ideas are useful across a wide array of sectors and roles. I hope you can take some of the ideas and make them your own.
A Hot Day In August
Having just started working for the customer service provider for a European automotive company as a Process Expert, I had just finished listening to a series of customer calls in English and French. My role was to analyse and improve all processes related to the customer experience. The calls were essentially customers calling to complain about a range of problems that they had been experiencing with their vehicles and to their credit, the customer service agents were trying their best to resolve the issues and keep the customers happy but something was missing.
Customer service agents have a difficult job to do and for anyone who has been in their shoes, having an abundance of patience, empathy, compassion and positivity is paramount. Empathy is a word that is talked about time and again especially in this domain but what is it and how should it be applied in a measured way when dealing with disappointed customers?
Empathy – not enough or too much?
Let’s first take a look at its meaning. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It’s about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, feeling their pain, joy, or any other emotion they’re experiencing. Empathy involves both cognitive understanding and emotional connection.
Let’s have a closer look at these two components.
- Cognitive empathy: Understanding another person’s perspective, thoughts, and feelings.
- Emotional empathy: Feeling the same emotions as the other person, or at least understanding and sharing their emotional state.
Empathy is a crucial human quality that helps us connect with others, form and nurture relationships as well as understand different perspectives. It’s essential for fostering compassion, understanding, and cooperation in society.
Back in 2016, the expression ‘soft skills’ was commonly used especially in this professional environment and the first thing that many agents were taught was how to show empathy as well as the importance of active listening. So why then were these calls I had listened to during my first few weeks in this new job lacking and made me question these agents’ approach? They had, after all, been trying their best.
After reviewing the calls again, something struck me – too much empathy isn’t a good thing. They had been taught and reminded over and over what empathy was and why it was essential in their job, but the ‘how’ was lacking. One call in particular was very striking in that the guy calling was initially very calm even though he had an issue that needed to be sorted. The agent was very attentive and showed sincere empathy and even compassion but then things changed because the agent kept reminding him of the problem and why it must have been upsetting him. The tone of the call changed when she couldn’t offer him a viable solution in the timeframe he was expecting. Things escalated in an ugly way and the call ended with him hanging up the phone.
What struck me was that this particular agent was well known as being one of the best in the team. If she had ‘lost’ this customer, what about her colleagues…?
It was evident that she didn’t make the switch from empathising to becoming a futurist quick enough and this had resulted in the unwanted outcome for both parties.
Problem solvers need to be ‘futurists’.
Imagine being in the shoes of a loyal customer who is disappointed about an aspect of a product or service. When you contact customer services, you of course expect a timely answer, a person who empathises with you, an element of compassion but most of all, you want an answer to your question or a resolution to your problem!
This is why measured empathy is essential but along with active listening and listening for detail, sooner rather than later, the agent must switch into a futurist mindset because that’s where the solution lies and where the customer expects the interaction to end up. This was what the agents weren’t doing during the calls because (1) they were over empathising and (2) in many cases they didn’t have the empowerment / info at hand to take the conversation in this direction.
If you over-empathise then by definition you keep reminding the person of their disappointment / pain and just like with many of these calls, because the agents couldn’t move towards a solution, the customers ended up feeling more frustrated than when they started the call! To add salt into the wound, what would frequently then happen is the customer would start calling back many times over subsequent days each time making it more difficult for both parties.
Emotional intelligence in the mix
After consulting with management, I took it upon myself to write and roll-out with the help of a handful of coaches a series of soft skills training modules for the 400 customer service agents for Europe.
The focus would be two-fold:
- To empower the agents more to enable them to become futurists with influence.
- To raise our Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 4.0 (detractor) to 8.0+ (promoter)
This wasn’t going to be easy but we were ready for the challenge. We had the full backing of the manufacturer and I set to work researching and pulling together as much info as I could from my previous 8 years in business training and customer service roles. One topic that I started to hear about was emotional intelligence and this resonated with me. After all, business (just like life itself) is all about people – the folks who deliver the promise of a brand and the people who spend their hard earned money with these companies. To be in tune with firstly each other as a team and then with customers made sense to me so I dug in and began to understand more.
The first competency of emotional intelligence is self-awareness, therefore the way we show-up in the eyes of our stakeholders dictates everything that happens to us at that given moment / on that day. This is why you’ll hear expressions like behaviour breeds behaviour because we do tend to mirror the behaviour of others around us.
At the same time in customer service, mirroring the behaviour of a disappointed or unhappy customer isn’t going to work so taking a more pragmatic and higher level view is route one to making sure that a win-win outcome is always the goal. Of course, this isn’t always the case but we must never forget that research shows that unhappy customers tell twice as many people as happy ones.
Stand and deliver
After plenty of on the job research, conversations with agents, listening to calls and writing and rewriting, the first modules were ready to deliver in late 2016.
The core themes were; active listening, listening for detail, the voice as a powerful tool (intonation, prosody..), empathy, compassion, assertiveness, becoming a futurist (where solutions lie), body language (yes on the telephone), positive influence and helicopter view thinking.
Initially, the delivery team faced some resistance but overall the feedback was very positive. Why? Because, based on Simon Sinek’s concept of ‘Start with why’, many companies have switched from focusing on the ‘what’ (they do) to the ‘why’ they do it but in many cases the crucial element in between – the how has been forgotten. This is what these agents had been missing.
Role-plays, open candid discussion and more empowerment to solve problems while explaining the steps in a clear and easy way helped to achieve our goals.
- To empower the agents more to enable them to become futurists with influence.
- We achieved this after a couple of months of analysis after the sessions based on agent interviews, customer feedback and reduced follow-up contact (2nd or 3rd calls, emails etc.) To top this off, the churn rate reduced by 5% over the following 6 months. The churn rate is notoriously high in this sector – as much as 30% in some cases.
- To raise our Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 4.0 (detractor) to 8.0+ (promoter)
- After 6 months, the average NPS score for Europe reached 7.5 which we were very happy with considering our starting point, churn rate and industry dynamics.
The lasting impact of this initiative is still being built-on to this day and it’s clear that focusing on the key behaviours that brands want their collaborators to epitomise whether in person, on the telephone or in writing is of paramount importance.
This starts within our own teams in the way we communicate. It is a mindset that through all levels of the company should be demonstrated on a daily basis. If this is the case and collaborators feel valued and look at problems as opportunities not obstacles, we can all collectively raise the bar.
One last thing. Another core competency of emotional intelligence is authenticity so all of what we have looked at here needs to be done in an authentic way. People see right through people who aren’t sincere and at its worst, this behaviour can come across as untrustworthy which of course, must be avoided at all costs. We’ll take a closer look at this in a future article.
Jeremy Williams | September 2024 | https://peercoaching460.carrd.co/
