Effective call handling skills are the cornerstone of exceptional customer service, especially if you’re in sales and support. As a sales or support agent, the way you interact with callers can make or break a business.
From building rapport to resolving issues, mastering effective call handling skills is essential for turning interactions into opportunities.
In this guide, we’ll equip you with the tools/features to excel in every call, with effective call handling skills that transform your calls into opportunities to wow your customers and turn every phone call into a sale.
Get ready to say goodbye to frustration and hello to skyrocketing customer satisfaction.
What is Effective Call Handling?
Effective call handling means dealing with customers on the phone in a manner that is helpful and polite. It’s about solving their problems quickly and making them happy. This involves providing clear and accurate solutions or answers, being empathetic and friendly, resolving the issue quickly and efficiently, confirming the customer is satisfied before ending the call and leaving a positive impression. At the end of this, the customer is meant to feel valued and supported.
9 Effective Call Handling Skills
- Connect with the caller
- Stay in control
- Communicate clearly
- Listen actively
- Keep information at the ready
- Show you care
- End the call strong
- Understand the customer
- Use the right tools
1. Connect with the caller
How do you engage customers when they make a call to your business/ What is the first impression they get? Effective call handling skills are necessary to make a good first impression.
Let’s use an example to drive home this point.
Mrs. Johnson currently uses her personal phone number which has a sim card, or a phone with no business features. When customers call, they are not greeted by any professional personalized message, and sometimes, Mrs. Johnson’s customer service agent is tired because customers have been calling all day.
However, a caller greeting feature with personalized messages gives customers (both old and interested) the impression that her business is a big and professional one where they are not first greeted by a harsh tone from a tired customer support agent.
The bottom line here is that your staff can attain effective call handling skills with the support of an automated caller greeting that leaves a great impression on your customers and keeps them engaged before they make their requests.
This will make them feel like your business can be trusted and that they are in the right place. Infact, they will gladly pay you what you’re worth because the impression you”ve given is a trustworthy and standard one.
For example, with PressOne’s caller greeting feature, your customers are bound to feel engaged, valued and that you are worthy of their patronage
Impressed customers are more likely to return and recommend your business, boosting your sales
Call feature to help: Caller greeting
2. Stay in control of the call
How do you make sure your calls are organized and that you have control over them as a customer support or sales agent?
Do you put them on hold or hang up to get them connected to the right team or department?. What feature do you have in place to ensure that your call structure or process is organized?
An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) feature demonstrates effective call handling skills and shows customers that the customer support or sales process is organized in several ways
First, it provides clear menu options, making it easy for customers to navigate and find the right support or sales channel. For example, it says “For customer support, press 1, for sales, press 2, for complaints, press 3”. This easily ensures efficient call transfer to the appropriate agent or department, reducing wait times and ensuring customers reach the right person.
It also provides automated answers to frequently asked questions, freeing up agents to focus on more complex issues. It also estimates wait times, offer callbacks, or allow customers to leave messages, minimizing frustration.
Besides, an IVR feature can offer support outside business hours, ensuring customers receive assistance whenever needed.
By implementing an effective IVR system, you showcase that your business is committed to organized and efficient customer support and sales processes, demonstrating that your team has effective call handling skills, thereby improving customer satisfaction. All this is possible with a PressOne business number.
Call feature to help: IVR
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3. Communicate clearly
Clear communication is an important aspect of effective call handling skills. Here’s a practical example:
Scenario: A customer calls a company’s customer service number to inquire about the status of their order.
Effective Call Handling:
Agent: “Thank you for calling Best Delivery. My name is John, and I’ll be happy to help you with your inquiry. Can you please provide me with your order number?”
Customer: “Yes, it’s #1234.”
Agent: “Thank you. I’ve located your order. It’s currently in transit and expected to arrive within the next 3-5 business days. Would you like me to provide you with the tracking information?”
Customer: “Yes, please.”
Agent: “The tracking number is 37659. You can use this to track the status of your order on our website. Is there anything else I can assist you with today?”
In the above communication, here is how John- the customer support agent, demonstrated effective call handling skills through clear communication.
- A Clear introduction: He introduces himself with his name and the company, setting a professional tone.
- Simple language: John uses simple and straightforward language to ask for the order number.
- Clear explanation: John confirms the order number and provides accurate information. He explains the status of the order and offers additional information (tracking number).
- Confirming understanding: The agent asks if there’s anything else they can assist with, ensuring the customer’s issue is fully resolved.
By communicating clearly, John demonstrates effective call handling skills, resolving the customer’s inquiry efficiently and professionally.
Call feature to help: Call Script
4. Listen actively
Active listening demonstrates effective call handling skills when you realize that the call is not about you, but the customer. Therefore, you need to pay attention to the caller. You focus on the caller, avoiding distractions and interruptions.
You also ask clarifying questions. You seek to understand the caller’s issue or concern, ensuring you have all the necessary information.
Also, use paraphrases by repeating back what you’ve understood, ensuring accuracy and showing the caller you’re engaged. You also need to empathize with the caller. You show understanding and compassion, helping to reduce tensions and build trust with the customer.
Effective call handling skills involves responding thoughtfully without dismissing the customer’s requests or complaints, no matter how minimal such requests or complaints may seem. You take time to consider your response, providing clear and concise answers or solutions.
A good customer support or sales agent avoids interrupting. Allow the customer to finish speaking before responding, showing respect and patience.
To help you, leverage PressOne’s call recording feature to automatically document important details, you can playback the conversation, ensuring you remember key points and can refer to them later.
By actively listening, you resolve issues efficiently, build strong relationships with customers and demonstrate professionalism and courtesy. This also shows you value the caller’s time and concerns
Effective active listening skills lead to successful call handling, resulting in satisfied callers and a positive reputation for your business.
Call feature to help: Call recording
5. Keep information at the ready
The best way to display knowledge and resourcefulness to customers is not by manually racking your brain to answer them. You can easily do this with a knowledge based add-on.
A knowledge-based add-on is a call feature that improves an agent’s ability to demonstrate knowledge and resourcefulness, ensuring effective call handling skills. Here’s a practical example:
Example:
A customer calls a telecom company’s support line, inquiring about a new data plan.
Without knowledge-based add-on:
Agent: “Let me check on our website… (pause) Okay, we have a few plans available. Which one are you interested in?”
With knowledge-based add-on:
Agent: “We have a new data plan that was just launched last week, offering 50% more data for the same price. Would you like me to explain the details and see if it fits your needs?”
In the second scenario, the agent uses the knowledge-based add-on to access relevant information quickly, provide timely and accurate answers, offer proactive solutions and showcase expertise and resourcefulness.
A PressOne knowledge based add-on enables the agent to easily retrieve information from a vast knowledge base, access, guides, and FAQs and receive real-time updates on products and services.
By leveraging this knowledge-based add-on, the agent demonstrates in-depth product knowledge and ability to offer personalized solutions to customers. They also show effective problem-solving skills.
This results in increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, effective call handling skills.
Call feature to help: Knowledge Based Add-On
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6. Show you care
Empathy towards customers is one of effective call handling skills because it makes customers feel valued and heard. Your empathy can calm frustrated or angry customers, reducing conflict and escalating situations.
This creates a safe space for customers to share concerns and feelings because understanding customer perspectives leads to more effective solutions.
It also leaves a positive impression that shows you are loyal to them
Empathy shows the human side of the support agent and shows that they are not just a representative, but a person who cares.
Practical examples of empathetic phrases:
- “I understand how frustrating that must be for you.”
- “I apologize for the inconvenience you’ve experienced.”
- “I can imagine how that would affect you.”
- “That sounds really tough. I’m here to help.”
By showing empathy, agents can turn negative experiences into positive ones, building strong relationships with customers and driving business success.
Call feature to help: Call AI
7. End the call strong
Call closure confirms the customer’s issue is fully resolved and they’re satisfied. It shows them that you’re not just interested in responding to their problem but also ensuring that the problem is resolved and that they are satisfied with how you handled it. This is why it’s one of the most effective call handling skills.
It also prevents or reduces the likelihood of the issue re-opening, saving time and resources. It encourages customers to share their experience, providing valuable insights about how to prevent such situations from happening to another customer.
Infact, it can be an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell. Identify opportunities to offer additional products or services.
Call closure demonstrates a commitment to customer satisfaction and follow-through. It leaves a positive impression, increasing customer loyalty.
Effective call closure involves:
- Confirming the resolution
- Verifying customer satisfaction
- Offering additional assistance or resources
- Thanking the customer for their business
- Ending the call on a positive note
Example script:
“Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
By mastering call closure, agents can ensure a positive customer experience, increase efficiency, and drive business growth.
8. Understand the customer
Effective call handling skills do not end when the customer hangs up. This is where customer sentiment analysis comes in.
Call sentiment analysis is like having a secret listener on your calls. It analyzes the conversation to understand the emotions behind the words. Imagine you have a customer who seems frustrated.
Call sentiment analysis can pick up on that by looking at things like tone of voice, choice of words, and even how long pauses last. By understanding the emotions on the call, you can improve customer service and satisfaction.
To carry out a thorough sentiment analysis, you need a PressOne call recording feature which automatically comes with a PressOne business number. With this feature, you can listen to calls between customers and your customer support staff, and analyze how customers feel through their words.
Are the customers angry? Were their request/complaint resolved? How did the customer support staff handle their complaint? Was the person rude?
You don’t want to lose customers because you know they make your business. So when you review these calls, coach your customer support team on how they can be better when handling customers, what they should say to customers and what not to say.
Call feature to help: Call recording
9. Use the right tools
While it’s great that you now listen and review calls between your customers and staff, you also need to know how your calls are performing. You want to know how many sales calls you receive per day or how many requests or complaints you receive. This will help you measure how truly effective the call handling skills of your team is and identify areas of improvement.
You also want to know how many outbound calls were made to customers who had made requests or complaints which were not resolved. You needs a structure around this because as a busy business owner, you want to keep track of your business and make sure your team is doing their best when handling customer calls.
Again, you need a PressOne Call Analytics feature which also automatically comes with a PressOne business number.
With this Call Analytics feature, you can easily see how many calls were made from your business and how many calls you received in a day.
This way, you can easily group them into sales calls, customer complaints calls and request calls. This puts a great structure around the way your agents handle customers, which in turn improves customer satisfaction
Call feature to help: Call analytics
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Bonus: Customer Relationship Management Tools (CRM)
Customer relationship management (CRM) is like having a super address book for your customers, but way more powerful! It’s a system that stores all your customer interactions – calls, emails, purchases – in one place.
Imagine it as a giant memory card. This lets you provide better service as you can see a customer’s history to understand their needs and preferences.
It also helps to send personalized messages and offers based on past purchases. You can then build stronger relationships even through simple things like remembering birthdays or previous conversations to create a more personal touch.
And Many More!
Leverage our integrations with customer relationship management tools like Hubspot, Zoho, Zendesk and more:
🚀 Zoho CRM: Track call logs and activities easily
🚀 Hubspot: Manage your call records and close deals seamlessly
🚀 Zendesk: Improve your overall customer experience and effortlessly transfer calls
🚀 Chrome Extension: Make and receive calls conveniently from your chrome browser
🚀 Freshdesk: Use call identification for a more efficient customer support team
Conclusion
Ready to improve customer satisfaction and make your customers happy with you handle their calls? PressOne is the right place to help you get started. Get a free demo with us today.
