Try it Out:
Training Empathy
Spend time with people who are different than you. Your team has
many opportunities to do this each day. Encourage them to strike up a conversation
with the barista at their coffee shop, or simply engage with colleagues in
other departments on a regular basis.
Training Positivity
Train yourself and your support team to replace negative words
with positive ones.
Carolyn Kopprasch, Chief Happiness Officer at Buffer, gives some
great examples in her post about how she stopped using “actually” and “but” in
her customer service emails. Note how different the tone feels in these two
sentences:
Sentence 1: I
really appreciate you writing in, but unfortunately we don’t have this feature
available.
Sentence 2: I
really appreciate you writing in! Unfortunately, we don’t have this feature
available.
These tiny changes can lead to dramatic differences in the
customer service experience.
Training Patience
Jane Bolton at Psychology Today has four great tips for training
patience in your customer service staff:
1. Understand the addictive nature of anger, irritation, and
outrage. The more you feel these emotions, the more like you are to keep
feeling them. Understanding that makes it clear why it’s so important to be
more patient.
2. Upgrade your attitude towards discomfort and pain. In
uncomfortable situations with customers where you feel your patience wearing
thin, remind yourself that “this is merely uncomfortable, not intolerable.”
3. Pay attention to when the irritation/pain starts. Find the
cues that cause you to lose your cool. That way, you can correct course before
it’s too late.
4. Control your self-talk. The things we say to ourselves have
an uncanny ability of coming true, whether they’re positive or negative. So
when you say “this customer is really starting to piss me off,” instead of, for
example, “this is a tough situation, but I’m going to stay calm and do what it
takes to solve the problem,” it can have a big impact on what the reality
becomes.