Call centers are an essential front-facing arm of any business, as they’re responsible for directly interacting with customers. While the call center may not be a customer’s first brand interaction, as most calls typically pertain to product purchases or prior brand experiences, they could be a first interaction with a live representative.
Speaking with a company representative is a more intimate experience than, say, making an online purchase or even interacting with a point of sale (POS). Customers will likely call with questions, concerns, or problems—in other words, they’re seeking help.
When customers contact a company’s call center, it’s usually because they don’t understand something or something has gone wrong with a product or service. Such a situation could lead to negative emotions or a more intense emotional state.
It’s a call center employee’s job not only to solve the problem at hand but also to use the interaction as an opportunity to create a positive brand experience. This requires high emotional intelligence or the skills needed to recognize and influence emotions.
What is emotional intelligence customer service, and why is it important? Here’s how your call center representatives can improve their emotional intelligence to provide positive customer experiences.
Understanding Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence centers on the ability to recognize and control emotions.
It starts with self-awareness and self-regulation — recognizing your own emotional state, coping with emotions, and communicating those emotions effectively. It also involves listening to others, understanding and validating their emotions, and expressing empathy.
Practicing emotional intelligence in customer service allows for effective communication, emotional regulation, quality customer care, and the potential to turn negative experiences into positive ones for callers.
While some people seem to have an innate capacity for emotional intelligence, that doesn’t mean it can’t be learned. With proper training, anyone can become more emotionally intelligent.
How to Improve Emotional Intelligence
Now that you understand this important concept better, it’s time to learn how to improve your emotional intelligence to provide the best service and facilitate a positive and satisfying customer experience.
Key strategies for enhancing emotional intelligence include improving emotional vocabulary, recognizing complex emotions, learning active listening techniques, and avoiding preconceptions.
Learn to Recognize Underlying Emotions
Emotional vocabulary and emotional intelligence go hand in hand. Most people can identify overarching emotions like happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, but the spectrum of human feelings is much more complex.
Someone who’s “happy” could be overjoyed or merely content. Similarly, an “angry” person might be annoyed, aggravated, or infuriated. To complicate matters further, people rarely feel just a single emotion at any given time — several emotions often occur simultaneously, adding to the difficulty of judging a caller’s emotional state.
Learning emotional intelligence starts with developing a vocabulary that makes recognizing and expressing emotional nuance possible.
When call center employees can describe the broad emotions a caller exhibits and the intensity of feeling, they’ll be better equipped to determine how to calm customers, solve their problems, and turn negative experiences into positive ones.
Practice Active Listening
Active listening is an important aspect of building emotional intelligence. When you listen to someone speak, you gather information through what they say and the words they choose, their tone of voice, and, in some cases, nonverbal cues like facial expressions and body language.
Call center representatives won’t have any visual cues to work from, but they can glean a lot about a caller’s emotional state from their word choice and tone of voice. There’s more to active listening than just hearing, though.
In addition to giving full attention to what a caller is saying, representatives must respond appropriately.
This may involve summarizing or paraphrasing what the caller has said to validate their feelings and ensure mutual understanding of the situation. Questioning and clarifying are also part of active listening; these should be done in a curious and non-combative manner.
Representatives must be aware of both the customer’s and their own emotional state. Depending on which seems appropriate, they should try to maintain either a neutral or an empathetic tone while avoiding negative tones that convey impatience or annoyance.
Avoid Preconceptions
It’s human nature to categorize things to create order and minimize confusion. However, this tendency can prevent fully understanding and addressing customer concerns.
Remember, empathy and emotional intelligence aren’t the same. Your customer service representative may try to empathize with callers to create a bond of trust. Without awareness, however, this can lead to transference, whereby your representative assumes that customers have the same feelings and reactions they would.
Making these assumptions could backfire if the customer has different feelings and motivations. It’s important to listen carefully to what the customer is saying, repeat it back to them to validate their concerns and ensure mutual understanding, and then work toward a solution.
This isn’t to say that empathy is a bad instinct. Expressing general empathy for customers’ pain points can help them feel heard and reduce feelings of distress.
That said, it’s worth reiterating that practicing emotional intelligence in customer service requires that representatives avoid making assumptions based on personal experiences that may not match the caller’s situation.
Partner With Like-Minded Service Providers
Not every company can support the level of call center service they need in-house. If you outsource some or all of your call center needs, it pays to research and find a like-minded provider that values emotional intelligence and strives to deliver a positive customer experience and desired brand associations.
Why Is Emotional Intelligence Customer Service Important?
People want to feel seen and heard. They want to know that their feelings are valid and that others understand them. This is among the most basic tenets of human social interaction.
The value of practicing emotional intelligence in customer service is that it can help to improve communication, diminish conflict, ease stress, and pave the way for positive outcomes.
Building a genuine rapport with customers isn’t possible without emotional intelligence. When call center representatives use emotional intelligence to create authentic connections, they have the best opportunity to appease customers and ensure a positive outcome.