Psych 101: Leveraging Psychology for Powerful Customer Service

A better psychological understanding of the needs of your customers can help elevate their experience from acceptable to exceptional.

What does psychology have to do with customer service?

Well, if you believe that the experience of your customers is unrelated to the service you provide, the answer is nothing.

However, if you feel that understanding your customers and their mindset during their service experience is critical to your success, then the answer is simple:

It means everything.

3 Uses for Psychology in the Contact Centre

Customer service doesn’t just use psychology, it relies on it for nearly every aspect of its function. Research done by American Express on Global Customer Service found that over half (55 percent) of respondents have quit partway through the purchasing process because of poor customer service performance.

Clearly, those agents didn’t have a solid understanding of the underlying psychological principles that contribute to quality service:

1. Building an Environment: applying psychology to customer service means putting yourself in your customer’s shoes to try and understand how they’re feeling. For most people, effective customer service relies on guidance and cooperation from service agents. To meet these goals, create an environment focused on making your customers feel supported during the process.

Often, animosity and frustration during customer service arise from callers feeling undervalued by agents—prevent this by fostering cooperation and teamwork between agents and callers to meet customer goals.

2. Empathize: A basic psychological principle is that people like to be treated with respect. This is particularly true for customer service outreach, where callers are predisposed to be upset from the get-go. Put yourself in their shoes. Empathy can be a powerful tool for understanding the minds of your callers and determining the best way to improve their experience.

3. Communication: The value of communication skills for contact centre agents is nothing new, but it’s amazing how much psychological impact effective communication can have on a customer. Proper communication in this area involves:

• Knowing when to talk (and when to keep quiet!)
• Ability to summarize points for clarity and consistency of communication throughout the process
• How to spin the negatives of a conversation into potential opportunities for improvement

Your goal here is to be empathetic and let your customers know that you understand how they’re feeling. Speak to them with understanding and let them know that you’re fully invested in finding a solution:

• “I can understand how frustrating this must be for you. I will resolve this for you, immediately”.
• “I appreciate you alerting us to this matter so that we can take care of this right away.”
• “I know how confusing it must be when…”

Stopping Negativity

While we’re on the topic of psychology in the contact centre, it’s important to point out that customer service agents don’t work with a level playing field—negative customer experiences have a far greater psychological impact than positive ones. This is but one reason you need to thoroughly vet your customer service outsourcing options in order to find those companies which excel at dealing with difficult customers.

While science isn’t precisely sure of why this takes place, there’s no denying its accuracy—research by Parature indicates that it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for a single unresolved negative one. That’s a lot of time and employee manpower needed to correct a single mistake.

So, how can you avoid the revenue losses associated with negative interactions?

Focus on the customer experience above all else.

• Personalize their service to make customers feel valued and appreciated. Empathy is necessary here—it’s easy to feel like “just another number” when contacting customer support. Adding a personal touch to your interaction to let customers know that you care will help them stay positive throughout the process.

• Consistency is key to avoid negative experiences – as unfair as it is, a single bad experience can ruin a customer’s entire perception of a business. This translates to unhappy customers, lost revenue, less web traffic, and a worsened brand presence from customer complaints on social channels. Consider the data gathered by Touch Agency on Twitter-based customer service which found that 80 percent of customer service-related tweets were critical or negative in nature. That’s a lot of bad press for companies whose business relies on a positive online presence.

Getting Inside Their Heads

While one bad experience may ruin your customer’s perceptions of your service, this isn’t always the case. Many customers will be forgiving of service mistakes as long as they feel valued, important, and connected to the company they’re doing business with.

The best ways to build these connections are with a little bit of applied psychology to inform the customer service process. When you walk a mile in their shoes before attempting to solve their problems, a mutual understanding is developed that makes the service process more enjoyable for all involved.

Curious about even more ways to apply psychology to your customer service initiatives? Check out our free white paper!