Patience, not all callers have it. They want everything and they want you to give it to them right now or else your NPS score will be terrible. The customer’s time is precious, we know this, but ours is too right? We have average call times to worry about, people waiting in queue and surveys to offer so when a lengthy struggle is thrown into the mix it gets pretty hard to keep patient yourself.
My first instinct in these times is to get rid of this caller and fast.
“Good morning Mr. Smith, yes here is all the information you require in one big gulp, take my survey thanks, bye.”
Right, on to the next call. But guess what? It’s Mr. Smith again with the exact same problem and the exact same questions. What is going on, why is Mr Smith doing this to me? I know he has the information he needs, I just gave it to him. But I gave it to him too fast and he has no idea what it means. We deal with these queries all day, every day and know our processes inside and out. But Mr. Smith is a plumber or a teacher or a doctor. This isn’t his specialty and he has no idea what to do with the lump of information I just spewed at him.
So here is Mr Smith, back again. I want my call to be compliant so I have to ask the same security questions again, have to ask him to explain his problem all over again even though I already know what he will say. I’m annoyed, he’s annoyed and suddenly our one quick call has turned into two calls, the second being much longer and more irate than the first.
This is where the patience comes in. If I had just taken that small amount of extra time to not just give MR Smith the information but explain thoroughly I could have prevented a repeat call. Less repeat calls means less people in the queues, less people refusing NPS because they’ve “already done it” and less pressure to hurry calls. More time to actually be patient, be understanding and show we care.
