Are You Engaged?

Great interpersonal skills are invaluable in customer service work. The ability to engage your callers can turn a confrontation into an agreement.

Although most people dealing with customers have good starting-out skills, people can become jaded or worse when dealing with customer problems all day. It's so easy to depersonalize the person on the other end of the telephone. It's one of the challenges of doing business by telephone.

We can overcome these challenges when we make a concerted effort to keep an open mind about each situation we find ourselves in. Sure, we can reference in the back of our minds all the possible scenarios that might be played out, but we need to stay in the moment. We need to remember to ask relevant questions.

The best service people are the ones who are capable of appearing genuinely engaged, no matter whether it's the beginning of their shift or the end. They recognize that each caller is an individual and treat them as such.

Your interpersonal skills are only as great as your last phone call. Question to ponder: How can you resist de-personalizing your calls?