Professional Telephone Techniques

Overview

“Learn lots of great skills and techniques to deliver excellent customer service over the telephone.”

This training course will help to delight all your customers – using the telephone. Participants will learn many telephone skills and techniques to gain rapport, impress people and communicate more clearly.

Objectives

By attending this course you will –

• Answer and make telephone calls in a professional manner
• Use techniques to efficiently respond to a customer call
• Build rapport with the customer and satisfy their needs quickly
• Handle a customer’s concern or complaint, with empathy and understanding

Content

Customer Care Excellence

• How customers are made to feel important

Improving your customer’s telephone call experience

• How to structure and control a call
• Telephone voice dynamics – developing an effective voice tone
• Perfecting a standard opening that works
• Importance of First Impressions
• Gaining rapport

Telephone tactics

• Self-awareness, assertiveness and confidence
• Creating clarity through clear communication, restating and accurate note-taking
• Improving your listening skills
• Questioning skills to obtain information and support your customers with their decision-making
• Positive words and phrases that put customers at ease
• Being empathetic and acknowledging the customer’s needs
• Taking control of a conversation and getting to the point
• Explaining the next steps and wrapping up a conversation

Dealing with Concerns and Complaints

• Dealing with the caller’s perceptions and expectations
• Understanding our own behaviour and its effect on others
• Strategies that effectively diffuse difficult situations and the complaining caller
• Options instead of saying ‘NO’
• Essential skills for not getting emotionally hooked with the difficult or angry customer