It depends on the company policy and the type of business, but these are helpful general guidelines.
- Smile while you’re on the phone. It actually changes the tone of your voice, even if it’s a fake one.
- Listen to the customer. Don’t interrupt or dismiss their feelings. Make every encounter a positive one.
- If you can’t solve a problem within 15 minutes, escalate it. Use the resources around you. You don’t want to spend hours on a problem that could have taken only a few minutes.
- Follow your basic troubleshooting steps. Google the problem.
- Ask a coworker if they experienced the same problem.
- If all else fails, escalate the ticket to someone higher than you.
- Learn how to prioritize tasks. Follow the company policy and ask your boss. Find out what is critical to the business. For example, let’s say the CEO needs you to do something right away. At the same time, something happens to a critical piece of equipment for the customer or business. What do you do? You fix the piece of equipment first. Think like the business.
- Before you send an email, run it through a simple grammar checker. Your credibility goes down the tube if you misspell words or have glaring mistakes.
- If the customer needs to speak with someone else, always do a warm transfer. First, ask the client if you have their permission to put them on hold. You’ll be back in a moment. You make another call to the destination agent the customer needs to speak with. You tell this person about your customer and their needs. Finally, you merge the call with you, the customer, and the destination agent. You say you have X on the line. The destination agent can take over from here.
- Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Would you rather know what’s going on and have your hand held, or blindly get bounced around 9 different techs having to repeat yourself every time?
- If you have some ticketing system, document the encounter with all the details. Write it in such a way that any other tech can easily pick up where you left off.
- If you’re ever put on the spot and don’t know what to say, you can use a few simple phrases.
- I don’t know off-hand, but I’ll find out and get back to you.
- Let me do some research and I’ll follow up with you
- Let me speak to my supervisor first
- I find it very helpful to have phrases and/or templates. It allows me to have canned messages for responses, so I can sound professional and not wing it.
- Remember to always log all contact attempts so if they decide to complain, your manager will have a trail to defend you with.