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How to Tell Anyone Anything - Start in a Safe Place

Do you manage customer contact professionals for a living? You probably dream about a workplace where everyone looks forward to coming to work in the morning, gives their very best effort, and creates consistently great customer experiences.

Well, guess what – I believe you can create such a workplace. Even in a world where it seems like your agents constantly say the wrong things to customers, act disengaged, fight with each other, or sometimes even forget to shower as often as they could. And best of all, you don’t need to surgically implant different personalities in everyone. You just need to change the way you coach them.

In this four-part blog series, we are going to look at a style of coaching that has little to do with what most managers do – namely, catching people doing things wrong and correcting them. This new strength-based approach to coaching has more to do with techniques from hostage negotiation, crisis counseling, and psychotherapy than it does with traditional management. And I have personally used this approach to create near-perfect customer satisfaction ratings, near-zero turnover, and high morale on my own support teams, as well as those of hundreds of training attendees.

The first step in the process, and today’s topic, is how to always start your discussions in a safe place – a place where you are completely on topic, but never put the listener on the defensive. It doesn’t mean beating around the bush, giving gratuitous praise, or asking about the wife and kids. It means breaking down your message into its “safe” (neutral) and “unsafe” components – ideally with a pencil and paper – before you ever open your mouth.

Surprisingly, your goal at this stage is not to solve the problem. Rather, you are simply trying to get the other person talking, so you can then follow the rest of the process: asking good questions, acknowledging the other person’s view of the world, and then boiling down your concerns into facts you can both troubleshoot. We’ll talk about these steps in subsequent blog entries. But for now, we just want to create a safe opening. Here are four ways to do this:

1. Ask someone how they perform a task. Use this approach when someone is doing their job ineffectively, so you can gather information for later troubleshooting.

Example: Clara’s help desk tickets are often wrong. Start the conversation with, “Could you walk me through how you set up a help desk ticket?”

2. Explore how the agent feels. Try this opening when someone is clearly frustrated by a situation, ranging from the last customer transaction to their overall job.

Example: Jose doesn’t know what to say when a customer gets frustrated with him. Start the dialogue with, “Do you feel stuck when people demand an escalation and no one is available?”

3. Make a neutral observation. This works best when people get emotional with customers or each other.
Example: When Fred has just snapped at a customer, open the discussion with, “I can tell that certain customers frustrate you.”

4. Share your own experience. Use this approach when someone has done something ill-advised, and you want to show them a better way. Compare this with something you have done or observed in others.

Example: When Uma puts half of her cases in the wrong queues, tell her, “I used to struggle with the same issue myself” or “I’ve seen lots of people do this.”

Done well – and more importantly, planned in advance – techniques like these not only put the other person at ease, but help take that knot in the pit of your stomach when you are facing a difficult discussion and replace it with confidence. Above all, with time and practice it will change how you talk with your employees, in a way that creates productive dialogue and real performance change.

Rich Gallagher is a communications skills expert, author, and former help desk executive. His book What to Say to a Porcupine: 20 Humorous Tales that Get to the Heart of Excellent Customer Service (AMACOM, 2008) was a national #1 customer service and business humor bestseller that was a finalist for the 2008 Business Book Awards, and his latest book How to Tell Anyone Anything (AMACOM, 2009) explores the mechanics of difficult workplace conversations. Visit Rich online at www.pointofcontactgroup.com