Business Insight Zone

Workin’ in the call center

Many years ago now, I worked for a few months in a call center for a credit-card company. The good news is that I was assigned to a group of reps that primarily handled accounts for high-end business travelers, who typically had plenty of money to spend and never ran into problems paying their bills.

The bad news was that . . . I was working in a call center for a credit-card company. I admire people who can do that work over the long haul, because inevitably you run into a lot of grief from customers who are unhappy because:

1. they screwed up;
2. the bank screwed up;
3. they’re in denial about what they can and can’t afford to spend;
4. their mama didn’t love them; or
5. whatever.

The big challenge for me was not to assume that the reason for the anger was #1, #3,  #4, or something similar. I worked for a well-run, non-predatory company that’s now part of JPMorgan Chase, but that didn’t mean that the bank was perfect — we made mistakes, too.

On top of that, even when #1, #3, or #4 was true, I couldn’t help the person on the phone — even if only to get them off the phone — if I didn’t LISTEN.

The same old lesson

“Sure, sure,” I can hear you saying. “Everybody should listen better. Of course.”

Yet we need reminding of it constantly. A wakeup call on this point came for me a few months back when I read this James Fallows item praising the interviewing acumen of Terry Gross:

She also avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.

What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview, is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads (”Now, that’s an intriguing idea, tell us more about…”), to look for interesting tensions (”You used to say X, but now it sounds like…”), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said (”It sounds as if you’re suggesting…”). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.

As a journalist and analyst, I’ve been on both sides of a lot of interviews, and I can confirm everything Fallows says.

The business application

It’s pretty simple, but bears repeating ad nauseam: If you’re going to solve someone’s problem, you have to listen to them to figure out what the problem is.

Somewhere, some customer of yours is confused or upset about something you could easily clear up. You could explain what needs explaining. You could rectify a mistake. You could undo a change they don’t like. But you don’t know what the “something” is yet, because you haven’t heard them.

So find them and listen to them so you can help them and, just for icing on the cake, learn from them.

Everything I’m saying here becomes even more important if you’re not in a customer-facing role, and an order of magnitude more important if you’re an executive in a non-customer-facing role. It’s much easier than we ever like to admit to miss the point if you’re not constantly in touch with the people who are actually using what you sell. When you take the chance to really listen, you’ll be shocked by how much your customer service reps know that you don’t.

I’ve talked many times about Peter Drucker’s “naive questions” — things like . . .

• Who are your customers?
• What do they want?
• Are you giving it to them?
• Are you making it easy?

Hold your own feet to the fire about asking and answering these questions — and make sure that the answers you get are based on listening to the customers themselves.

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Further reading:

• Matt Dickman: Three keys to better listening

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Photo by Stian Rødven Eide, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Category: Customer service, Management