Whether you have an internal call center or are working with an outsourced CX partner to manage your customer experience, phone scripts are essential for maintaining consistency. We talk a lot about the importance of digital marketing and its role in the customer’s journey, but one thing is for sure - a phone call and a human conversation is something that won’t (and can’t) go away.

What is a phone script (also referred to as a call script)?

This is a set of instructions on how to communicate with your contacts that provides the language, tone, and series of questions needed to evaluate and pass along opportunities or resolve issues. When we talk about a customer service phone script, we don’t mean a word-for-word script. We simply mean a list of guidelines for your customer service agents that helps them provide the best possible service for your customers.

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Top 3 Essentials for Successful Customer Experience Phone Scripts

1. Prioritize Agent Training

Training is a key part of helping make any person successful in their role and even more-so with a call center agent. Since your agents are the front-line of your brand when they directly interact with your customers, you want to ensure they’re set up for success to handle a variety of situations.

Important Phone Script Training Topics:

• Introduce your company. 

• Describe who your target buyers are. 

• Detail your products/services. 

• Explain brand messaging and value propositions.  

• Walkthrough how to navigate your systems and enter data. 

• Highlight product packages and promotional offers. 

• Teach different sales pitches. 

• Call out common objections and how to overcome each. 

If you have a self-help resource library, walking the team through how to search for and isolate resources within it can also be a big time saver and set the team up for success. Include within your call script where to locate this information so it’s easiest for your team to know where they can go to find a solution to the customer’s problem. This can help allow your customer experience team to be more independent when working to solve a customer’s problem and avoid the need for lengthy hold times or requiring the agent to escalate the call if they don’t know how to handle it.

2. Ensure Accuracy of All Information

What’s the point in training your CX team on information that isn’t accurate? The next CX phone script essential is to ensure all information passed to your agents is completely accurate.

The CX call script is the guide book to ensure your CX team has the information they need to successfully help your customers. Therefore, if the scripting document doesn’t have accurate information, how can your customer service agents be expected to provide accurate assistance to your customers? The goal of a phone script or outline is to improve customer experience, not hinder it so before training your CX agents on it or signing off on your outsourced CX partner to use it, ensure that every piece of information has been carefully reviewed for accuracy.

It’s important to not set and forget your phone scripts. The goal is to keep improving call quality, right? So, we recommend using data to better understand what is and isn’t working for your customers and work to make improvements on the parts of the script that aren’t serving your customers or your brand. If you need help with optimizing and improving your CX call scripts, your outsourced partner should be equipped to offer suggestions based on industry best practices. 

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3. Encourage Call Center Agents to be Personal

One thing we focus on a lot at Incept is the importance of human conversations rather than robotic, monotone conversations, which end up feeling more one-sided rather than a true conversation. One way to avoid your customer service representatives sounding robotic on calls is to not provide an exact line-by-line script of what your team “should” say. This may sound counterintuitive to ensuring agents have all the necessary information to be efficient during their call, however a line-by-line script only encourages your CX team to spout off word for word what your script states.

Did You Know: 60% of all consumers said they’d stop doing business with a brand if the service they received was not friendly.

Steps to Make Customer Service Calls More Personal:

1. Reference the customer by name. With today’s technology, there is no reason a customer service agent shouldn’t be able to know the customer’s name simply by opening their account...or even just asking who they’re speaking to!

2. Fully understand the customer’s relation to the brand and how they utilize the product. Any specific information your agents can pull up regarding their account without the customer having to report their entire history will prove that the service representative is there to help them and knows what they’re doing.

3. Listen. Listen. And listen some more. Rule number one for communication is listening to understand, rather than listening to speak. When a customer service rep fully listens and understands the customer’s problem, they are more capable of solving the issue at hand efficiently, without the customer needing to repeat themselves multiple times.

4. Use positive words.

5. Go above and beyond to help the customer solve their problem. 

Learn more about customer experience, how you can improve it, and outsourcing

We compiled a free guide (yes, totally free - you don’t even need to give us your email!) on CX and how outsourcing can be beneficial for your organization. Not only will you find information about outsourcing, we also provide details on customer journey mapping, customer experience strategy, training, and more.

ABOUT INCEPT

Incept is an outsourced call center service that brings true conversational marketing back to customer experience. Our team of customer service representatives and experts partner with your team to improve the outcome of customer interactions and satisfaction, promote and protect your brand, and accelerate growth.

We’ve worked with some of the largest brands in the world to develop CX campaigns with one main goal - strengthen relationships at every touch point. From inbound phone calls and technical support, to organic and paid social media campaigns, to live chat, Incept is one of the best call center outsourcing vendors to assist all your CX and lead generation needs.