The Five Worst Things to Say on a Business Call
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1. “Please hold.”
People like choices, so whenever you must place a customer on hold, always give them a hold time, and a choice. For instance, it’s best to say, “I need to put you on hold for just a few minutes, is that okay or shall I call you back?” If the customer agrees to being put on hold, you have their permission to be gone for a few minutes, but not much longer. If after those first few minutes you still are unable to get back to them, pick the phone back up and let them know. Customers will be very forgiving if you communicate openly with them.
2. “You’ll have to call back later.”
Never put the responsibility of action on the customer. You be the proactive one. Remember the old cliché, "If you’re not willing to go the extra mile for your customer, someone else will."
3. “I’m sorry, that is our company policy.”
Policy can be a good thing. But too often it becomes the easy out. Instead of hiding behind company policy, take the extra minute to explain the logic behind the policy. If the policy only serves the company, and not the customer, the customer will most likely take their business somewhere else.
4. “I’m sorry, that’s not my job.”
This is one of the most common, yet the absolute worst thing to say. If it’s a customer, it is YOUR job. Customer service is everyone’s responsibility.
5. “We’re having trouble with our servers.”
This is simply not a caller’s problem, nor a reason to avoid good service. Apologize for the fact that you cannot help the caller, pick up a pen, write down the phone number, and get back to the caller as soon as you can.
Call Center Metrics
As recently reported by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), following are key findings from a recent survey on call center KPIs/performance metrics:
- More than a third (39.1%) of respondents reported that they do not measure first-call resolution in their call center.
- The most common email response time objective indicated by respondents was 12.01 to 24 hours, with nearly three quarters stating that they either “always meet” (15.9%), “nearly always meet” (49.4%) or “usually meet” (18.3%) their objective.
- The majority (57.8%) of centers have an adherence to schedule objective of between 90% and 100%; most (78.7%) either always, nearly always or usually meet that objective.
- Only 57.1% of centers surveyed measure forecasting accuracy.
- Two thirds of respondents reported an average quality score of 81% to 90% (43.5%) or 91% to 100% (36.9%).
- One in three centers (29.3%) do not measure customer satisfaction.
- Nearly half (45.6%) of centers do not measure agent satisfaction.
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