empathy, trust, diffusing conflict and handling complaintsempathy, trust, diffusing conflict and handling complaintsempathy skills - for relationships, communications, complaints, customer retention, conflict and levels of listening typesEmpathy and trust are a platform for effective understanding, communication and relationships. Empathy and trust are essential to develop solutions, win and retain business, and avoiding or diffusing conflict. Empathy and trust are essential for handling complaints and retaining customers. These days we need to be more effective communicators to be successful in business - and in life. The 'steps of the sale', persuasion, closing techniques, features and benefits do not build rapport or relationships - empathy, trust, understanding and sympathetic communications do. One-sided persuasion is not sustainable and is often insulting, especially when handling complaints. Trust and empathy are far more important in achieving and sustaining successful personal and business relationships. A certain legacy of the days of the hard-sell is that many consumers and business people are more reluctant to expose themselves to situations where they may be asked to make a decision. This places extra pressure on the process of arriving at a deal, and very special skills are now needed to manage the situations in which business is done. Most modern gurus in the areas of communications, management and self-development refer in one way or another to the importance of empathy - really understanding the pther person's position and feelings. Being able to 'step back', and achieve a detachment from our own emotions, is essential for effective, constructive relationships. Whether for selling, customer retention, handling complaints, diffusing conflict, empathy helps.
trust - and understanding the other person's standpointPart of the 'empathy process' is establishing trust and rapport. Creating trust and rapport helps us to have sensible 'adult' discussions (see Transational Analysis, which is another useful model for understanding more about empathy). Establishing trust is about listening and understanding - not necessarily agreeing (which is different) - to the other person. Listening without judging. A useful focus to aim for when listening to another person is to try to understand how the other person feels, and to discover what they want to achieve. Dr Stephen Covey (of 'The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People'® fame) is one of many modern advocates who urge us to strive deeply to understand the other person's point of view. Sharon Drew Morgen's Buying Facilitation concept is another signpost towards this more open, modern, collaborative approach (and it is not retricted to buying and selling). It is difficult and rarely appropriate to try to persuade another person to do what we want; instead we must understand what the other person wants, and then try help them to achieve it, which often includes helping them to see the way to do it (which is central to Sharon Drew Morgen's approach). We must work with people collaboratively, to enable them to see what they want, and then help tem to see the ways achieve it. The act of doing all this establishes trust.
listeningOf all the communications skills, listening is arguably the one which makes the biggest difference. The most brilliant and effective speaker utlimately comes undone if he/she fails to listen properly. Listening does not come naturally to most people, so we need to work hard at it; to stop ourselves 'jumping in' and giving our opinions. Mostly, people don't listen - they just take turns to speak - we all tend to be more interested in announcing our own views and experiences than really listening and understanding others. This is ironinic since we all like to be listened to and understood. Covey says rightly that when we are understood we feel affirmed and validated. He coined the expression: 'Seek first to understand, and then to be understood', which serves as a constant reminder for the need to listen to the other person before you can expect them to listen to you.
levels of listening - 'effective listening'There are different types of listening. Typically they are presented as levels of listening. Various people have constructed listening models. Below is an attempt to encompass and extend good current listening theory in an accessible and concise way. Bear in mind that listening is rarely confined merely to words. Sometimes what you are listening to will include other sounds or intonation or verbal/emotional noises. Sometimes listening involves noticing a silence or a pause - nothing - 'dead air' as it's known in broadcasting. You might instead be listening to a musical performance, or an engine noise, or a crowded meeting, for the purpose of understanding and assessing what is actually happening or being said. Also, listening in its fullest sense, as you will see below, ultimately includes many non-verbal and non-audible factors, such as body language, facial expressions, reactions of others, cultural elements, and the reactions of the speaker and the listeners to each other. In summary first:
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©Alan Chapman 2009 See also the summary and interpretation of Mehrabian's communications theory, which considers communications from the standpoint of the 'receiver' of communications, and it's implications for the 'sender' of communications. See Sharon Drew Morgen's theory of Buying Facilitation, which is adaptable beyond selling and business, and which relates strongly to, and has amongst other significant influences, helped to inspire the concept of Facilitative Listening.
handling complaints and customer retention in organizationsThe principle of ownership is central to complaints handling: if you receive a complaint or query you continue to own it until it is resolved - even if you escalate it or delegate it - which means that you must always follow-up and check on progress and eventually resolution and satisfaction. The measurement and monitoring of complaints, from receipt to resolution is also vital: the organisation must have suitable systems and commitment to do this, especially from the very top. There is a difference between 'understanding' someone and 'agreeing' with them: everyone in the organisation should have the training, encouragement and ability, to understand and to convey that they understand - to see the reality of the other person's position and feelings - whether they are right or wrong - and should have the training and authority to 'agree' where appropriate, which has implications for authorization levels and compensation offerings. Seek complaints and feedback: the organisation should welcome complaints and should encourage staff to ask for them - complaints enable quality improvement and ultimately improve relations with customers (the vast majority of customers are more loyal after the complaint is resolved satisfactorily than they were before the complaint arose). Incidentally, from a staff-selection perspective, people with strong right basal brain quadrant - which produces intuition and empathy - make good complaint receivers. Strong left basal enables good processing and follow-up. Strong right frontal enables good creative problem-solving. (See the Benziger page.) Use the 'over-compensation' principle: always look after complaining customers extremely well - generally regardless of whether they are right or wrong. Organisations often begrudge compensating complaining customers, which is completely illogical, because complaints are relatively rare and the real cost of compensation is relatively inexpensive, and yet the benefits from customer satisfaction, increased loyalty and positive word-of-mouth, are enormous by comparison.
trust and rapport training to improve customer serviceHere are some pointers as to how you can develop empathy skills for customer service staff, especially in call-centres, and situations where customer retention is a strong priority. Use a training exercise to flush out all the 'wrong' ways to handle these customer situations - it's often much easier for a group to identify (via role play and/or syndicates) wrong ways, and then make sure they avoid them. Customers resist strongly being persuaded against their urge to contact and terminate a contract - the persuasive approach immediately polarises customer service representative and customer; the resulting emotional issue then dominates, removing any chance to save the customer. All initial effort must be to establish rapport and understanding - without the rapport nothing can be done. Use a training exercise to identify rapport-establishing phrases, questions, and then role-play to demonstrate, practice and demonstrate suitable tone - style must be highly sympathetic and interested (the tendency is for tone to be confrontational, competitive, challenging, etc, which makes matters worse). Demonstrate also how it can take several minutes to do this - sometimes several conversations. Through role-play, observe how easy it is to shatter rapport by moving into persuasive mode. Stay 'with' the customer - understand (not necessarily the same as agreeing) and sympathise, allowing the discussion to develop, rather than present an opposing proposition. Use a training exercise to identify suitable empathic information-gathering questions - what do we need to know in order to help, how to ask for this information, and how to position the need to ask questions in the first place, once initial rapport has been established. Use a training exercise to identify approaches, and ' ready-made' phrases, to view customers' situations objectively with the customers - 'let's look at this together and see what the options are...' - rather than the tendency to go head-to-head and counter the customer's position with superior argument, justification, or worse still implied or direct threat, such as penalties, etc. (It's easy to fall into the confrontation trap because so much sales training and experience is based on the power of persuasion, which is in itself highly confrontational in defensive scenarios.) The secret to customer retention is the relationship in the first few seconds - customers are far more likely to rethink and stay if they 'like' the person on the other end of the phone. Certainly a customer will not begin to reconsider if they 'dislike' the other person - instead they become empowered to accelerate and reinforce withdrawal from the moment they feel the slightest bit challenged or opposed. Role-play sympathetic phrases and tone for this scenario: you meet a friend in the street and learn from them that they have suffered an upsetting experience - listen for the natural empathy and sympathy - there is no instinct here to persuade the friend to 'get a grip' or 'snap out of it' - the natural sympathetic response is the basis of building trust and empathy and rapport. Trust, rapport, empathy and understanding are powerful relationship-builders, and form the bedrock of sustainable business and careers.
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