Types of Customers & How to Approach Each One

Types of Customers & How to Approach Each One

by | Jan 11, 2022 | Call Center, Customer Engagement

Call Center

We are all customers at some point, and we all expect different things from our shopping experience. Some prefer to browse alone, while others need constant help and assistance to be happy. IT’s important to know what your customers want, and meet those expectations every time. Let’s explore 7 common types of customers, and how to approach each one with the biggest chances of a successful interaction and ideally, a sale!

1. Lookers & Browsers

Lookers are browsing your site or store, and are likely pricing out the different options. They are interested in a product, but haven’t chosen it yet. Dealing with lookers, means making your site or store look as attractive and intriguing as possible. Make sure your copy is compelling and innovative. Remove obstacles like pop-ups, ads and even AI chat-bots, as this can turn people off to your site.

2. Discount Hunters

93% of shoppers use coupons or coupon codes to get discounts each year. These customers want what they want, and they are seeking out the best price. While you can’t always offer the best price, you can give them added benefits that might overcome this issue. Make sure they understand the value in your product, by making your copy and prices clear. Show them the many benefits you offer, like excellent customer service or even free shipping.

3. Impulse Buyers

Impulse buyers have no plan, but do have a credit card and they are ready to use it. The best way to deal with impulse buyers, is to create a seamless experience for them, removing all obstacles. These shoppers love time-sensitive deals and crisp compelling copy, that makes up their mind for them.

4. Switchers

These customers are already involved with a competitor, and are finding their service wanting. They want to consider you as an alternative, and you must make this easy. First, determine what your competition is doing to turn off their customers, and then fill that gap within your own organization. These customers are looking for a long-term relationship, so show them how easy it is to work with you with great customer service and value for their money.

5. At-Risk Customers

58% of American consumers will leave a company due to poor customer service. These customers have purchased your product, but have abandoned it because they lost interest, went to the competition or got into something new. These customers can be identified by the amount of time between log-ins or purchases. To fix this issue, get in touch with them personally to ask what they need. This type of customer generally is open to discussion of their issues and pain points, and letting your fix them if you can.

6. Referrals

Referral customers come to you through a loyal customer, and expect great things of your service, before even using it. The loyal customer has made the sale, and know you need to live up to their expectations and the new customer expectations. Have a clear onboarding plan for these new customers, making the experience as smooth as possible. Referral customers love interaction and even first-time discounts, and when treated well, are sure to be your next loyal customers.

7. Unhappy or Dissatisfied

These customers are the most difficult to handle, and are not happy with you. You can find them in call centers, making complaints, and even putting negative reviews on social media. Deal with these customers carefully by taking them seriously. Reply to their comments on social media, using kindness and professionalism. Follow up with them after first contact to make sure you solved the issue. It’s critical that you are empathetic with these customers, and think of how you’d like to be treated in the same situation.

Every customer is different and has different needs. It’s important to tailor your services, products and communication to each type of customer, to achieve the best result. For help categorizing and optimizing for the best customer experience, contact the experts at ListenTrust today.

Different Types Of Call Centers: Inbound, Outbound, Automated — What They Are & Which Is Best For Your Business.

Different Types Of Call Centers: Inbound, Outbound, Automated — What They Are & Which Is Best For Your Business.

by | Jan 11, 2022 | Call Center, Culture

Different Types Of Call Centers

A call center is often the first contact a customer has with your business, and it’s critical that you choose the right kind of call center for your needs, and the needs of your customer. There are many different types of call centers, key among them inbound, outbound and automated call centers. What sets each type of call center apart, and how do you choose the right one? Let’s explore each type of call center and how they operate.

Inbound, Outbound & Automated Call Centers

Inbound call centers are commonly used to answer calls from customers as they come in. Tasks associated with inbound call center agents include payments, follow-up, tech support and basic help questions and answers.

Outbound call centers are responsible for outreach to customers, often with a specific purpose, and are sometimes called telemarketers. Using an outbound call center is great in situations where you need more lead generation, cold calling or even survey data from customers. This is also a great option if you want to do proactive outreach to customers.

Automated call centers greet customers with recorded messages and funnel them through a series of easy questions, in an effort to send them to the right representative or department of the company

Examples of Call Center by Industry

Every industry has different needs , and choosing the right call center is critical to meeting those needs. For example, the airline industry typically needs customer service agents with access to flight status, frequent flyer balances and a while array of information for each call. Healthcare call centers need to be able to set appointments, direct customers to the right physician, and know when to direct patients directly to the hospital. Retail needs agents who can facilitate a refund or return, or answer questions about company policy. No matter the unique needs of your particular business or industry, there is a call center to meet them.

The Importance of Call Centers

A Microsoft survey found that 90% of Americans factor in customer service when choosing a company to do business with. There are many reasons a company might choose to work with a call center. Perhaps they aren’t able to deliver the customer service that they want too, or they are getting too many calls per day, monopolizing time and resources. Call centers can free up staff to focus on more productive tasks, over fielding calls. In addition, most call centers operate 24 hours, meaning customers will always have a basic level of support. After you’ve decided what type of call center you will employ, it’s time to decide which service is right for your business . There are several elements to take into account when choosing a call center.

  • Size – Does the call center have enough staff to meet your business needs?
  • Security – Does your chosen call center have a good reputation and security practices to protect both company and customer data?
  • Cost – How much will the call center cost, and will you see a return on your investment? Will you use dedicated or shared agents, and how does this affect your business?
  • Experience – How long has the call center been in business and what industries have the worked with in the past? How does the call center handle reporting and data regarding day to day operations?
  • Location – Is your call center on-shore or overseas, and what languages will your call center agents speak fluently? Will agents be able to effectively communicate with your customers, leaving them satisfied after the call?

For more information on call centers, and how you can use them to boost your business and productivity, contact ListenTrust today.

Common Call Center Challenges & How to Overcome Them

Common Call Center Challenges & How to Overcome Them

by | Jan 11, 2022 | Call Center, Culture

Call Center Challenges

Call centers can be tough to manage, with an array of agents, scripts, clients, hours and languages. They are also a quickly growing market, expected to peak at $496 billion by 2027. When considering implying or building your own call center, it’s important to look at the common challenges associated with call centers, and how others have overcome them to create a successful and productive work environment that customers and staff appreciate.

A call center is where you expect to get answers, fast. Agents should have access to your data, and the answers you need – and they need it fast. In short, there are two main reasons to create a call center: Customer service and satisfaction and to generate more revenue. Let’s explore some of the most common call center challenges, and how they can be overcome!

1. Technology Issues

There is so much technology available for the modern call center, it’s hard to know where to start. CRM systems, management tools, auto or predictive diallers, and IVR solutions are just a few of the options you have when setting up a call center. It’s important to get the right, complementary technology that works together seamlessly, with no delay. Many call centers find that they have deployed too much technology without testing its usability, or that they aren’t making effective use of the technology they do have. The solution is simple – test out all technology thoroughly before deploying it, and work out all the bugs before your agents start using it with customers.

2. Customer Satisfaction

You could say that if your call center is suffering from low customer satisfaction, you don’t have a good call center. Customers dislike many things about call centers. Sometimes the scripts are uncomfortable and unnatural, technology slow or staff unprofessional. Sometimes staff simply isn’t trained well or doesn’t have access to the data they need to please customers and answer their questions. To fix this issue, train your staff carefully, and consider running customer satisfaction surveys, to see where you can improve. Ask your staff and customers for feedback to identify problems early.

3. Absenteeism & Unreliability

Call centers are tough places to work. You are presented with unhappy customers and issues daily, and it takes an endless amount of patience and empathy to get it right. This stress creates an environment where staff call our or leave frequently. This has become an especially big issue since the “Great Resignation” of 2021. To fix this issue, enforce strong policies around absenteeism. Be flexible with your employees with family or health issues that might cause them to be out. Some are even setting up call center employees in their own homes. Use the same empathy that you expect of your call center employees, when dealing with their personal issues (that we all deal with).

4. Productivity

A common issue with call centers is agent productivity. With a large staff, some potentially working from home, how do you track agent productivity and how do you encourage your staff? Some are overcoming this issue by establishing clear key performance indicators, or KPIs, or deploying remote agent management tools. Finally, you can’t ignore the importance of moral on a productive work environment. Find ways to motivate your staff to give excellent customer service each and every time by offering rewards, accommodations or even prizes. Recognize excellence in your staff, and elevate that person to train others.

Consumers are trending toward a huge appreciation of good customer service, with so much bad customer service available, and 80% of Americans say that a positive customer experience depends on speed, convenience, knowledge and friendliness. We are relying on call centers more and more, but without equipping your staff with the right technology and the best policies and management, you are setting yourself up for failure. Ultimately, all that matters is that you are pleasing your customers, and solving their issues – and prioritizing your customers means focusing on your staff and internal practices first.

For more information on common issues call centers face, and how to overcome them, contact ListenTrust today.

Unlock the Benefits of Contact Center Scripts

Unlock the Benefits of Contact Center Scripts

by | Oct 19, 2021 | Call Center

Call Center Script

Call centers are your greatest asset when providing excellent, one-on-one customer service in an increasingly digital world. Customers will often never even visit your store in person, meaning their only interaction with your company will be online or through the phone. Contact center scripts help you maintain high service standards in your call center to ensure everyone is handled fairly, kindly, and quickly.

Let’s explore the benefits of contact center scripts and how several call center script best practices can help you take the leap into world-class customer service.

First Things First—What Are Contact Center Scripts?

Providing your call center agents with a well-written script is an easy way to train representatives. Call center scripting is proven to reduce errors and gives the agent the information and confidence to deal with difficult customers and solve common call center challenges quickly and professionally. They are also great for cold calling operations because they make it easy and fluid to ask for customer information.

The Benefits of Call Center Scripts

Not only will the right contact center script ensure your customers will start to see your brand as an organized, uniform business, there are other benefits as well.

Helps Form a Better Impression

You only have a moment to make a good impression on a call. When customers are greeted with professionalism and know they can expect excellent service when they call, they’re more likely to be flexible, open up to the representative, and share more information. You have even less time to impress potential customers on a cold call. Professionally researched and well-written call center scripts will help your customer service team make the best impression possible—every time they pick up the phone.

Promotes Consistency

Consistency is important to the reputation of any company. Call center scripts provide a standard level that ensures your reps have all the information they need. When written and implemented correctly, every customer gets the same advice, no matter what agent they speak to. This type of uniformity also helps speed up the service process, since each agent always has the answers right in front of them.

Improves Productivity and Effectiveness

While empathy is important to customers, they also want their issue solved quickly and effectively. Contact center scripts help agents ask the right questions to get to the root of the issue fast by keeping the most common questions and solutions available at all times. The longer call center representatives use their script, the more material they’ll remember, eventually making them your most valuable resource.

Boosts Confidence

Agents are also more confident when they have something to follow. Instead of worrying about crafting the perfect response, agents can get ahead of the issue. Ensuring that critical information is readily available for reps means they’ll sound more relaxed and in control to customers, who will then trust their answers and solutions. Also, script eliminates the extra stress of coming up with responses on the fly, making agents sound more professional.

Reduce Mistakes

Thirty-three percent of consumers say a good customer service experience is strongly linked to resolving their issue in one single interaction, no matter how long it takes. We all make mistakes, but when you have only a few moments, it’s important to get it right the first time. Call center scripts help agents move smoothly past common issues and problems to solve customer issues immediately.

Decrease Training Time

Scripts reduce the amount of time devoted to training your team on the basics and commonly asked questions, letting you focus on fine-tuning their sales or customer service skills. Great ones allow agents to learn while doing, decreasing the time it takes to solve problems or make sales.

Improve Performance and Customer Satisfaction

Good call center scripts are developed based on past call performance and customer satisfaction. Be sure to review calls for good and bad elements to your team’s attention so they can learn. Take examples of great performance, and steadily incorporate the lessons learned into your script, which should evolve and grow as needed.

 

Before partnering with a call center to handle your customer service needs, there are a few factors you should consider.

Learn More

 

Call Center Script Best Practices

Now that we know the benefits of using a contact center script, how do you develop one?

Make it Concise and Skimmable

Make sure your script is simple enough for agents to eventually memorize, but should also contain all relevant information without glossing over issues. If agents must pause or put the customer on hold to look something up, you’ve defeated the purpose of having a script at all. Try using bullet points or easy-to-read charts to help agents identify and address issues quickly.

Revise It Oten

Your call center script should evolve often as your customer needs do. Call centers are a valuable source of data on how customers are using and receiving their products and services. As your business uses this data to update or improve, you should be able to do the same with your script to deal with new issues and the most current questions.

Make It Adaptable

Call center scripts are not one-size-fits-all, and should be adapted for each situation. Having different ones available will help agents quickly assist customers and ensure a better experience.

Be Flexible

Scripts are a critical element of setting up a productive and organized call, not a hard-and-fast rule for every agent and business. Encourage agents to throw out the script if it’s necessary. Don’t be afraid to change things as needed to make them more effective.

Optimize Your Contact Center Script With ListenTrust

ListenTrust’s scripting consulting services are proven to help clients optimize their call center scripts and maximize one of your most valuable resources—your staff. Reach out to our experts today to get started.

 

How to Deal with Angry Customers in a Call Center

How to Deal with Angry Customers in a Call Center

by | Oct 12, 2021 | Call Center, Customer Engagement

How to Deal with Angry Customers in a Call Center

Dealing with difficult customers is an unavoidable part of any business. All issues, however small, must be dealt with quickly, ideally to the customer’s satisfaction. It’s important that your staff are trained to help customers navigate their issues and find a solution quickly and professionally. Focusing your energies training staff to deal with unhappy customers is important for several reasons including:

  • Polite and efficient communication and issue resolution will help you retain an unhappy customer
  • Positive reviews and feedback from customers can be used for future marketing campaigns and look great to potential new customers
  • Your company can develop better products and processes, to prevent the issue from happening again.

5 Tips on How To Deal With Angry Customers

Angry customers are actually your greatest opportunity! Over 90% of those who receive a bad customer service experience won’t patronize that business again, but 68% of those same consumers would actually be willing to pay more to a company with excellent customer service. This article will explore 5 tips proven to help when dealing with difficult customers.

1. Listen

Simple, common-sense solutions like actively listening to an issue from a customer, could make the difference between a successfully handled issue and lost business. When face to face with customers, nodding, making eye contact, and taking notes during your conversation will show the customer you are listening and taking them seriously.

Dealing with difficult customers via phone or text is a bit more complex, as active listening is difficult to display. In this situation, take notes and repeat the customers’ words back to them, to show you are listening. Avoid the impulse to interrupt, even if you can solve their issue immediately. Listening is the greatest asset in your customer service quiver, so don’t underestimate how powerful your silence can be!

2. Don’t Take it Personally

Even though it’s natural to get defensive in a stressful situation of someone else’s doing, good customer service requires an extra bit of self-awareness, allowing you to separate yourself from the issue. Try adopting a mindset of you and the customer against the issue, and focus on finding a solution, together with the customer. Using language like “I’d like to help,” and “If I’m hearing you correctly…” can show an unhappy customer that you take them seriously, and will work to resolve their issue.

3. Show Empathy

Have you ever tried to calm someone down by telling them to “calm down?” It simply doesn’t work, many have discovered it too late when facing an angry wife or customer. People find it very calming when someone takes on their cause and shows empathy for the problem, and the stress it causes. Validate the caller or customer by telling them that you see the problem and will work to find a solution.

Many adopt the mantra “sympathize, empathize and apologize” in their conversations with unhappy customers. You can also share brief stories to show that you have experienced this type of situation before, and understand why it’s so upsetting. Verbalize your sympathy, and try summarizing the pain points back when dealing with difficult customers, to show you have a good understanding of the issue and are considering different solutions.

4. Try to Remain Calm

It’s important to detach from stressful situations, to give yourself the best chance of a successful resolution. Try to match the unhappy customer’s level of frustration with an equal amount of calm and empathy for their issue. Watch your tone carefully for any sarcasm, as this type of reaction is sure to escalate the situation. Try these tips proven to help you stay calm in stressful situations.

  • Focus on maintaining an even tone at all times.
  • Remember that the customer is angry at the situation, not you.
  • Think about how you would feel if this issue had happened to you, and treat the customer how you would like to be treated.
  • Take slow calming breaths while the customer is speaking.
  • Smile as you speak. People can even hear a smile through a phone!

5. Offer a Solution & Follow Up

At this point you’ve listened and should have a good idea of what the problem is and how to fix it. It’s important to offer a solution that satisfies the customer. Many issues can be solved simply by listening and offering empathy, but be prepared to offer some sort of compensation for the issue. The cost of a refund or shipping a new product to your unhappy customer will be negligible compared to the bad publicity of a bad review or online complaint. By following up with the customer after the transaction is complete, you leave them with a good feeling about your company and the service you’ve provided during a stressful time.

86% of good customer service interactions turn a one-time customer into a long-term, repeat customer. Unhappy customers could potentially be your biggest brand advocates if their issue is handled correctly.

For more information on how to deal with angry customers, or for help getting a professional customer service call center up and running, contact ListenTrust today. ListenTrust serves a wide range of customers in most key verticals including FSI, E-commerce, retail, education, and the medical industry. Take advantage of our years of experience, or one of our many other products or services designed to enhance your brand experience and ultimately, profits, and contact ListenTrust today.

Get Started by Contacting ListenTrust Today!

For more information, contact Tom Sheppard, VP Business Development, at: tsheppard@listentrust.com

Call Center Outsourcing: Why Should You Outsource Your Company’s Call Center?

Call Center Outsourcing: Why Should You Outsource Your Company’s Call Center?

by | Oct 1, 2021 | Call Center

call center outsourcing
Call centers are responsible for all-important empathetic and effective customer service, making them essential to all enterprises. Businesses currently using call center outsourcing are loving lower costs, improved customer service, and a boost to their own productivity. Customers, domestic and global, love immediate access to assistance or information in their native language. Let’s explore a few massive benefits of using call center outsourcing services.

1. It’s Cost-Effective

Data shows that businesses can save up to 50% by taking advantage of outsourcing opportunities. Setting up a call center is expensive, and requires a great deal of infrastructure, space, and trained staff.

Because professional call centers are already equipped with the latest technology, you can get started immediately with very little initial investment. Call centers also share highly-trained agents who work faster and more efficiently, reducing your costs further. The massive shift in work structure brought about by the pandemic makes using outsourced call centers a more logical, cost-effective choice for most enterprises.

2. You Have the Opportunity Outsource to Customer Service Experts

Outsourced call centers employ customer service experts, trained and skilled to handle all customer eventualities with grace and professionalism. Professional call centers have tested and proven processes and training designed to help their representatives understand your business expectations, customer pain points, and can even suggest appropriate customer engagement strategies for your business.

Call center staff are trained to deal with a large volume of calls, emails, and inquiries on many different platforms. Customers contact an enterprise for many reasons, chief among them complaints or questions, which must be handled with delicacy and professionalism. Special training and on-the-job experience dealing with tense or confusing situations is another major benefit of working with outsourced customer service experts.

3. Offer 24/7 Support

Our “new normal” calls for 24/7 connectivity, making it essential to work with larger and more universally available teams with the ability to service many regions. Customers appreciate 24/7, 365 coverage, which conveys extreme dependability, and businesses love the security of knowing processes are running seamlessly outside business hours.

Offering 24/7 support also has the potential to open up new markets. Many businesses are asking themselves, “Why growing businesses should use call center outsourcing?” Times of growth and change require the most comprehensive support for both customers and staff, and call center outsourcing services let staff focus on the business of growth, and customers focus on the business of enjoying your product.

4. Improved Productivity

While your product or service might be stellar, if your staff is overwhelmed by critical customer service functions, they are typically unable to focus on future innovations or initiatives, sales, production, or distribution. For example, successful marketing campaigns bring in a flood of new business, paired with an increased call volume that has the potential to overwhelm your staff. Call center outsourcing enterprises are designed to easily handle enormous call volumes, a feature that will certainly be appreciated by growing companies.

Call volume is highly dependent on time, rising and falling as your chosen markets wake and sleep. Businesses with a multi-regional or global footprint typically struggle to stay connected after business hours without using a professional call center to handle business or requests at odd hours. Many are choosing to task call center outsourcing services with answering FAQs (frequently asked questions), while more complex issues are handed off to in-house staff.

5. Offer Multi-Lingual Support

Studies show that 67 million American-based consumers speak a second language at home, and only 63 million are bilingual with English language skills. Even an English-speaking country like the United States has a very large number of non-English speaking customers in need of support. Employing multi-lingual customer service reps creates an environment of trust and easy communication between your enterprise and your customers, both domestic and international.

360° customer support and international language skills also have the potential to open up new, global markets to your business. Outsourcing your call center means you are no longer tethered to a single location or domestic customers, even those native to your own country. Reach out to a new market your competition can’t reach or explore what new products and services you are in a unique position to provide to both the domestic and global market.

For more information on how call center outsourcing services can save you money, please your customers, and open up new markets and opportunities, contact ListenTrust today. ListenTrust serves a wide range of customers in most key verticals including E-commerce, retail, education, and the medical industry, just to name a few.

Take advantage of our years of experience and bilingual call centers, or one of our many other products or services designed to enhance your brand, brand experience, and ultimately, profits.

Get Started by Contacting ListenTrust Today!

For more information, contact Tom Sheppard, VP Business Development, at: tsheppard@listentrust.com

Why is Having Bilingual Customer Service Representatives Important to Your Business?

Why is Having Bilingual Customer Service Representatives Important to Your Business?

by | Sep 21, 2021 | Call Center, Hispanic

bilingual customer service

Did you know that the percentage of bilinguals in the United States has doubled since 1980? This means second languages are being spoken and learned at home, and that English is often a second language, even to native speakers. Luckily, the availability of bilingual professionals is steadily increasing, leaving no excuses for a lack of bilingual customer service representatives.

Globalization has become a reality in today’s digital world of 24/7 connectivity, opening up lucrative avenues for forward-thinking enterprise, and also presenting new stumbling blocks for the unprepared. It’s critical to build rapport with clients of all countries and cultures, by employing bi or multi-lingual customer service representatives, who can speak the customer’s language and demonstrate the cultural sensitivity that builds true rapport. Let’s explore a few major benefits of offering more inclusive and globally-minded services, through the use of bilingual customer service representatives.

Why is Being Bilingual Important to a Business?

The Spanish-speaking population of the USA stands at 43 million and the Chinese-speaking population at almost 3 million – making it easy to imagine the myriad of other languages relied on in the USA for day-to-day business and communication. With these numbers on the rise, providing bilingual service is becoming increasingly important to establishing and maintaining a successful business. Let’s explore a few examples of how implementing this policy change can keep your business vital and relevant.

Increased Customer Base

There are 6912 living languages in the world, with the largest portion being Chinese speakers, and the honored position of 2nd place going to English. It’s easy to see that by limiting the number of languages spoken by your customer service representatives, you are severely crippling the reach and influence of your business. Also, considering the number of ESL speakers in the USA, it’s important to offer customer service in different languages.

Valuing Your Customers

Great customer service doesn’t include the word “no,” but that’s the first and last thing your Spanish-speaking customer hears when you have no bilingual call center representatives to help them purchase or operate your product or service. 41 million Spanish speakers in the USA might be waiting to engage their massive buying power with your business, but this vast group of customers will have no choice but to seek out a company with more bilingual support options if you don’t offer them.

Why is Having Bilingual Customer Service Representatives Important to your Business?

Communication is the key to offering both the best product and the best customer support. Building a bilingual customer service department or call center provides several immediate and long-lasting benefits to any business. Let’s explore a few of the most impactful byproducts of providing bilingual customer service.

1. An Optimal Customer Experience

The customer experience starts when the customer finds or is attracted to your business, and ends when they’ve successfully used your product or service. Hiring bilingual customer service reps ensures customers can have the full customer experience and have help in the language they are most comfortable using.

2. Encourages Brand Affinity

Brand affinity is the holy grail of business success, and happy and loyal customers are repeat customers. Bilingual citizens in the USA and abroad have rich and bustling communities of like-minded and culturally similar individuals and share great or horrible business or personal experiences with a large number of community members. Don’t underestimate the value of word of mouth in marketing, and encourage customer longevity by offering everyone, regardless of language skills, the opportunity to love your business or product, and all the work you’ve put into it.

3. Gives a Competitive Edge

Simply put, if you are the only company in your market space to offer customer service in Farsi or Tagalog, you have the competitive edge in those communities. If you’ve resigned yourself to only selling or interacting with the English-speaking world, you are simply not in the same league as other businesses that have the ability to communicate with international or non-English speaking customers. You might offer a better product or service, but no one in the bilingual community will ever know.

4. Demonstrates Commitment to Inclusivity

Inclusiveness and diversity are proven to spur business growth and create a more fun, creative and innovative atmosphere around both your office and your company. Inclusive work environments are known to be incubators for great ideas, and attract the best and brightest talent, with a wide array of unique cultural experiences and language skills. Bilingual customer service reps and professionals are proven to be fast, organized, and critical thinkers, with a grasp of cultural nuances that monolingual employees might not have, but will pick up on in an inclusive and diverse work environment.

5. Expansion opportunities to other markets

U.S.-based organizations often find expansion into foreign markets untenable, due to language barriers. There is simply no way to expand into a new, non-English speaking market, without hiring and emphasizing the use of the local language for sales, customer service, and product support. Communication is the key to establishing yourself in a new market, and hiring bilingual customer service representatives is a great start toward creating a more international work environment, and also learning about the needs and preferences of your new potential market.

ListenTrust is in the business of communication, and business is good. We partner with companies to help build a better brand experience, provide solutions, listen to customers and earn their trust. Customer engagement isn’t one-size-fits-all, and the best way to find out what gets your customers excited is to listen – ideally while they speak their language of choice. Contact ListenTrust today for more information on their broad range of solutions for building a bilingual customer service call center, and rapport with a broad range of dedicated customers.

Why Is It Important to Establish Rapport with Clients?

Why Is It Important to Establish Rapport with Clients?

by | Sep 14, 2021 | Call Center, Customer Engagement

build rapport with clients

If you’re in sales, customer service, marketing, consulting, running a small business, or work with an agency, or in any kind of customer/client-facing role, it’s likely you’ve heard of the importance of building rapport with clients. But what exactly does it mean to build rapport and why is this important? In this article, we will explore the importance of building rapport, its benefits, and how to foster this type of symbiotic, trusting relationship with clients.

Establishing rapport with clients boils down to one simple, yet crucial concept: Trust. Building trust with clients is a lengthy process, and no easy feat, yet paramount in any kind of business partnership. Putting in the work to build and maintain trust between you and your client is proven to be rewarding in a myriad of ways. Let’s unpack them.

Benefits of Building Rapport With Clients

Trust is a difficult thing to build, and an easy thing to lose. The world’s most successful businesses focus on building rapport that will allow them to offer a more intuitive product and maintain the trust customers put in them by continuing to invest in the business relationship. Let’s explore a few measurable benefits of building and maintaining excellent rapport with your clients.

1. More Sales

A whopping 89% of customers will make a repeat purchase after a positive customer service experience. Customers are more likely to invest in your product when you’ve invested in your relationship. If you’ve built rapport with your customer, they will enthusiastically reach out to you again and again for help, advice, and new products or solutions, even if you’ve yet to deliver results.

2. Better Reputation

A 2020 Walker study found that a great customer experience will trump price and even product quality, differentiating your brand with an immediate reputation for great and long-lasting relationships. Happy and trusting clients are more likely to provide positive reviews of your business, and recommend you to others, giving you the opportunity to win over even more clients.

3. Stand Out From The Competition

While some companies are forced to focus on simply keeping up with trends and staying current, others are taking advantage of the rapport they’ve built with their clients to work smarter, not harder. Consumers are loyal to both the best products and services, and businesses that value transparency, authenticity, and longevity of customer relationships.

How to Build Rapport With a Client?

Now that we understand a few of the crucial benefits of building excellent rapport with clients, let’s discuss a few easy practices you should be implementing to ensure excellent rapport with a customer.

1. Ask Questions

Ask your client rapport-building questions about their personal view of their company and business goals. Listening carefully will give you a clear idea of client priorities, and unique insight into how to meet their needs. Examples of rapport-building questions include a more personal line of questioning like,” I see you attended X university! What did you like best about your time there?” Asking informed questions to build rapport shows the client you are dedicated to offering a tailor-made product and long-lasting relationship and will take their goals to heart – and to the bank.

2. Listen Empathetically

Practice active listening, and make note of keywords, critical issues, and primary goals. By closing your mouth and opening your ears, you are also opening the door for more trusting future communication and a long-lasting relationship, where your customer feels comfortable seeking you out for advice, or future work.

3. Establish Common Ground

Using small talk to find common ground is a great way of establishing rapport with clients, and showing a genuine interest, which is a tough thing to fake! A rapport-building question about a detail of the client blog or website is a great way to demonstrate a common interest in their business and success. Asking open-ended questions will help your client “open up,” and share personal experiences that you might share, for a firm and trusting foundation to your relationship.

4. Mirror & Match

The “mirror and match” technique draws on the truth that we prefer to interact with people who we perceive to be similar to ourselves. What we say is negligible, when our body language and voice portray disinterest or a lack of understanding. The most successful communicators watch and mimic the body language of others, adopt a similar temperament, use similar language, and attempt to match the tone, tempo, and volume of the other person’s voice. Science says that employing these methods of connection results in stronger intimacy, trust, and client rapport.

Rapport-building questions are an easy way to make a personal, more long-lasting connection with existing and potential customers. If a company culture of excellent customer relationships sounds like it could benefit your business, contact ListenTrust today, or read on to learn more about how establishing rapport with clients through the use of bilingual customer service can future-proof and globalize your business.

Get Started by Contacting ListenTrust Today!

For more information, contact Tom Sheppard, VP of Business Development, at: tsheppard@listentrust.com.