Customer Service Skill – Listening to the Customer

Customer Service Skill – Listening to the Customer

Successful listening is essential for any customer service representative to achieve customer service excellence. Like any other customer service skill, active listening is a learned behavior that some people perform better than others. To provide the best customer service possible you must master this skill, especially as part of telephone etiquette when dealing with customers over the telephone.

Customer Service Representative Skill- Building – Listening to the Customer

Some common characteristics possessed by most effective listeners include:

  • Empathy.Putting yourself in the customer’s place and trying to relate to the customer’s needs, wants, and concerns.
  • Understanding.The ability to listen as customers speak in order to ensure that you realize what they want, need and expect. This is essential in properly servicing the customer.
  • Patience. Taking the time to pause and listen attentively as your customer speaks. Keep in mind that it is your job to serve the customer and that not everyone communicates in the same manner. Thus, you must put forth the effort to allow your customer to share their ideas, issues or questions without interrupting in order to determine their needs.
  • Attentiveness. By focusing your attention on the customer, you can better interpret his or her message and satisfy his or her needs. Attentiveness is often displayed through nonverbal cues (e,g, nodding or cocking of the head to one side or the other, smiling, or using paralanguage).
  • Objectivity. In dealings with customers, try to avoid subjective opinions or judgments. If you have a preconceived idea about customers, their concerns or questions, the environment, or anything related to the customers, you could mishandle the situation.

The characteristics of effective and ineffective listeners are summarized below.

Characteristics of Effective and Ineffective Listeners

Many factors can indicate an effective or ineffective listener. Over the years, researchers have assigned the following characteristics to effective and ineffective listeners. As a customer service professional, strive to master the skills in the left column and work to eliminate those in the right column in order to better serve your customers.
Effective   Listeners Ineffective   Listeners
Focused Inattentive
Responsive Uncaring
Alert Distracted
Understanding Unconcerned
Caring Insensitive
Empathetic Smug/conceited
Unemotional Emotionally involved
Interested Self-centered
Patient Judgmental
Cautious Disorganized
Open Defensive

For additional ideas on listening to the customer and providing excellent customer service, get a copy of Customer Service Skills for Success.

Listening to Customers Quote – Ross Perot

Listening to Customers Quote – Ross Perot

“Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face.

You’d be amazed how many companies

don’t listen to their customers.” Ross Perot

Active listening is the key element in communications with your customers. Whether face-to-face or over the telephone, you must not only hear what customers are saying; you must get their intended meaning. To do this you must stop everything else you are doing and focus on the customer. You also have to receive, analyze and respond appropriately to their messages. Anything less will likely lead to a service breakdown and damage to the customer-provider relationship.

Former U.S. presidential candidate and businessman, Ross Perot, summed this concept up in a statement he once made:

Listening to Customers Quote - Ross PerotFor strategies and techniques to improve your listening skills when dealing with customers, get copies of How to Be A Great Call Center Representative and Customer Service Skills for Success.

Learn All About Robert C. ‘Bob’ Lucas Now & Understand Why He is an Authority in the Customer Service Skills Industry

Robert C. ‘Bob’ Lucas has been a trainer, presenter, customer service expert, and adult educator for over four decades. He has written hundreds of articles on training, writing, self-publishing, and workplace learning skills and issues. He is also an award-winning author who has written thirty-seven books on topics such as, writing, relationships, customer service, brain-based learning, and creative training strategies, interpersonal communication, diversity, and supervisory skills. Additionally, he has contributed articles, chapters, and activities to eighteen compilation books. Bob retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1991 after twenty-two years of active and reserve service.

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The key to successfully making money as an author and/or self-publisher is to brand yourself and your company and to make yourself and your book(s) a household name. Part of this is face-to-face interaction with people at trade shows, library events, book readings, book store signings, blogging or guest blogging on a topic related to their book(s). Another strategy involves writing articles and other materials that show up online and are found when people search for a given topic related to a topic about which the author has written.

If you need help building an author platform, branding yourself and your book(s) or generating recognition for what you do, Make Money Writing Books will help. Bob’s popular book addresses a multitude of ideas and strategies that you can use to help sell more books and create residual and passive income streams. The tips outlined in the book are focused to help authors but apply to virtually any professional trying to increase personal and product recognition and visibility.

In my book Customer Service Skills for Success, I define customer service as “the ability of knowledgeable, capable, and enthusiastic employees to deliver products and services to their internal and external customers in a manner that satisfies identified and unidentified needs and ultimately results in positive word-of-mouth publicity and return business.”

Listening Quote – Ralph Nichols

Listening Quote – Ralph Nichols

Actively listening to your customers is one of the easiest ways to ensure that you not only get the correct message that they send, but also that you show respect and you care about them. As you listen to your customers, you also start to better understand them and recognize some of their values, beliefs, needs, wants and expectations.

Dr. Ralph Nichols, sometimes called the “Father of Listening,” summarized the importance of listening in the following quote:

Listening Quote - Ralph Nichols

For ideas and suggestions on how to effectively listen to your customers, get copies of Customer Service Skills for Success and How to Be A Great Call Center Representative.

About Robert C. Lucas

Bob Lucas has been a trainer, presenter, customer service expert, and adult educator for over four decades. He has written hundreds of articles on training, writing, self-publishing, and workplace learning skills and issues. He is also an award-winning author who has written thirty-seven books on topics such as, writing, relationships, customer service, brain-based learning, and creative training strategies, interpersonal communication, diversity, and supervisory skills.

Additionally, he has contributed articles, chapters, and activities to eighteen compilation books. Bob retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1991 after twenty-two years of active and reserve service.

Bob Lucas B.S., M.A., M.A, CPLP is the principal in Robert W. Lucas Enterprises, Inc and an internationally-known author; learning and performance professionals. He has written and contributed to numerous books on the subject of customer service skill training.

He regularly conducts workshops on creative training, train-the-trainer, customer service, interpersonal communication, and management,
and supervisory skills.

Learn more about Bob and his organization at www.robertwlucas.com and follow his blogs at www.robertwlucas.com/wordpress,
www.customerserviceskillsbook.com, and www.thecreativetrainer.com. Like Bob at www.facebook.com/robertwlucasenterprises

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