If you try to mirror each individual customer's speech rate, you increase the likelihood of the customer responding with words like: "Thank you very much" or "Lovely" by approx. 15%. That is compared to conversations where you speak 30% faster than the customer.
In fact, the vast majority of customer service agents speak significantly faster than their customers.
In conversations where you ask the right number of questions, you increase the probability of getting a satisfied customer by 50% compared to conversations where you do not ask any questions at all.
The probability of achieving a high level of customer satisfaction increases by more than 15% when you greet the customer with welcoming expressions such as "sorry" or "I understand".
This effect is even greater if you are welcoming to customers who have already expressed dissatisfaction at the start of the conversation.
When customers use words such as "annoying" or "frustrating" early on in conversations, it is very likely that your negative word count doubles as well.
On the contrary, you are likely to be infected by your customers' polite phrases as well.
But... it is not necessarily a bad sign if you are one of those people who sometimes copy your customer's negative word choice. It can also be a way to show empathy and understanding of the customer's problem.
In general, you should avoid too much silence during your customer conversations. This is because customers are generally more satisfied when they experience less silence in a conversation.
In fact, the likelihood of increased customer satisfaction is about 25% higher if the proportion of silence in the conversation is less than 10% compared to when there is more than 25% silence during the conversation.
One of the reasons for this may be that dissatisfied customers with difficult issues more often require you to take the time to fully investigate their problem in order to solve it in the best possible way.
Repeat calls are the type of conversations that the customer initiates with: "I called ..." or "I was just talking to ...". And these types of calls cost both frustration and valuable time.
Yet repeat calls account for more than 10% of the total number of customer conversations in Scandinavian contact centers.
If your customer center is one of those with a high number of repeat calls, there is a lot of room for improvement if you make an effort. Because this type of call is typically 50% longer than the average call and customers show significantly more frustration.
Those conversations where you have to "check up" or "ask a colleague" are often time-consuming. In fact, the calls where you need to seek information are typically 73% longer than the average conversation.
If you want to avoid this, you should focus on minimizing your knowledge gaps on atypical topics. This is the type of inquiry that is most often responsible for repeat calls.
Filler words that have no value on their own take up a lot of space in customer conversations. This could be words such as: "well" or "weird".
Conversations that contain many of these words are typically around 25% longer than average conversations.
Our research shows that many call centers can save as much as 15% of total call time just by minimizing the number of filler words in conversations.
