YOUR AGENTS ARE AMAZING! As you can see from the above illustration, every time they are on a call they are using their Frontal, Parietal & Temporal Lobes! Who’d have thunk it?
You have probably read a number of articles online about the different elements that each “good call” will have in common. We will talk about that in the next post, but for now let’s take a step back and look at the raw materials… the parts of the brain that your agents will need to be using during a call.
The Frontal Lobe takes up 41% of the brain and is the seat of much of our thinking, judgement and creativity. Your Agents will need to think on their feet (or in their seat!) when a question from a customer is off-script. Do they treat all calls the same or quickly learn the nature of the call and caller. Their tone of voice could be a make-or-break element to the call. When a customer asks a tricky question, maybe there’s a clever work-around that the Agent could suggest, maybe even think of something while on the call/chat? Your agents will have to use their judgment on certain calls where the conversation takes a more antagonistic turn.
The Frontal Lobe is probably the most engaged part of your Agent’s brain.
The Parietal lobe is key to our communications skills. Your Agent’s choice of language and tone makes a difference to the outcome. You can script a conversation can and you can train your Agents to respond to many different types of call but their choice of language and tone will impact on how the caller perceives that interaction. This might sound a little obvious, but let’s not underestimate the importance of being able to read while under pressure on a call. We forget how difficult citing information from very detailed terms and conditions while under pressure.
During a call this part of their brain is hard at work.
This is where our feelings live and where we store short term memories. Showing empathy could be the difference between a successful or a negative call. Empathy comes more naturally to some of your agents. Identify those agents that aren’t as strong in this area and work with them to help them understand the impact. Learning of course is important (might we even say it’s a no brainer?). There is the initial getting-up-to-speed for call center training that they will need to go through and then there is the information specific to the interaction that must be learned on the fly.
Next month we will have a follow up to this post where we will look closely at what a really good call looks like taking all these elements and applying them in the real world. We will look at the communications used during the call itself, at the emotional components of these calls, and we will look at what needs to happen during and after the call.
