Why Should Your Customers Pay Attention?
Why Should Your Customers Pay Attention? You may answer ‘…because it’s in their interest doing so’. While I may agree with you, such an answer is based on rational elements: whenever customers ask for some kind of support, they should listen carefully. Well, I have some bad news for you though, because some of them do not pay attention to what you say or write. Let’s see why it happens, what the consequences are, and how you can prevent or mitigate them.
Why It Happens
Nowadays, as we all receive tons of input through our smartphones and PCs, we have to deal with too many interactions. Think about your daily routine: checking early morning incoming Whatsapp messages and doing the same with your work emails. Then deciding who to answer first and what to say. Then here comes the climax: you will get interrupted while you read by other notifications:
- An incoming phone call (yes, sometimes we still communicate using our voice).
- Another digital message – social media or messaging
- Other external factors – somebody at home or in your office calls you or draws your attention (un)wittingly?
All the above examples represent distractions and stress that let us be not fully concentrated on what we are reading (before and especially after the interruption takes place). On top of that, add some ‘multi-tasking juice’ meaning that the customers may be carrying out another activity while he/she is having a conversation with you over the phone or reading your digital response over email. Consequently, don’t take for granted that all customers pay attention because some of them may be distracted.
How To Prevent and Mitigate
As a former customer service manager and today as a consultant and trainer, that’s definitely not an easy scenario to deal with, even for seasoned support agents. That being said, there are some ‘moments of the conversations’ where we need to make sure that our customers are fully aware of what we are saying/writing them. Accordingly, what are the consequences if they do not pay attention? Therefore you need to get your support trained on leveraging two key elements:
1. Active listening – in order to detect any customer’s emotional signals behind what they are asking for or just saying. While this is an easier task having phone (aka voice) conversations, over digital channels, that’s another sport. That’s why in my Digital Customer Service training sessions, I let customer service teams exercise a lot on reading between the lines, before writing a response over email, social media, or messaging apps.
2. Proactivity – being able to anticipate our customers’ next move or questions, mutually saving time and effort. That’s another vital skill that smart companies leverage to stand out from competitors in terms of customer experience, as well as internal productivity. Because they’re fully aware that regardless of the conversational channels you provide the customer with, moving from reactive to proactive support is a must.
Over To You
To which extent do your customers pay attention when they’re listening to you or reading your responses? Are you measuring how distracted customers have a negative impact on your operations? Share your experience in the comments.
Have great conversations.
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Paolo Fabrizio
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