Myra Golden: How to Improve Your Call Control Skills

Call control is part art, part science.

It's the ability to politely, yet quickly move along a customer service call. These skills were originally a big part of call center agent training back when talk time, or handle time, was considered an essential metric.

Today, fewer contact centers are holding agents accountable for the length of each call, but call control still remains an important skill.

• Customers don't want to waste time.

• Quicker calls generally lead to higher satisfaction.

• Faster calls allow you to serve more customers.

I interviewed contact center expert, Myra Golden, to get tips on call control skills. Golden is a certified master de-escalation instructor and customer experience designer who has an impressive call control course on LinkedIn Learning.

Here are just a few topics we covered in our conversation:

• What is call control?

• Why do calls take longer than they should?

• How do you use call control skills with upset customers?

• How can contact centers make call control easier for agents?

• What can agents do to make customers feel great, but still keep the call on track?

You can watch the full, 22 minute interview or skim some of the highlights below.

What is call control?

Golden offered a succinct definition of call control.

"Call control is the art of politely moving a call forward to closure."

Many customer calls go on longer than they need to. Some customers are upset, while others are just extra talkative.

Years ago, when I had my first full-time job as a contact center agent, I had a regular customer who was quite the talker. He could talk to me for an hour about the smallest of issues. The customer wasn't angry—he just seemed to have a lot of time on his hands.

He was also an important customer who worked for one of my biggest accounts, so I felt I had to stay on the phone as long as he wanted.

One day, an experienced colleague pulled me aside and explained how the long phone calls were keeping me away from other customers. He had just taken a call from another customer of mine who didn't want to wait to speak to me.

It was then that I realized that I needed a better way to keep my important customer happy, while avoiding friction with other customers and my coworkers.

You can hear more of Golden's definition of call control at the :52 second mark of the interview.

Why do calls take longer than they should?

"A lot of the time, it's the customer," said Golden. "They don't know how to get to the point. They want to tell you the backstory and the journey of how they got there."

That was my important customer. He could talk for days about the smallest thing.

Of course, there are many times when the customer service professional causes a call to go on too long. One example is when we don't provide enough information.

"We lose control when we don't proactively answer the customer's questions," said Golden. For example, if you tell a customer someone will get back to them, that invites a number of follow-up questions.

• Who will reach out?

• How will they contact the customer?

• When will they reach out?

It's better to use clear and specific language up front to set expectations, so the customer doesn't need to ask a lot of follow-up questions. For example, you could tell a customer, “I will give you a call back by Monday at 4pm with an update.”

Hear more about why calls take too long at the 3:24 mark of the interview.

How do you use call control skills with upset customers?

Customer service professionals frequently try to speed up the call when they encounter an upset customer. They try to get straight to the point and solve the problem quickly.

Unfortunately, this often backfires.

Customers are more judgmental and less open to ideas when they're angry. An upset customer might resist your suggestions for a quick solution, which ends up prolonging the call.

"When a person is upset, they are very often in the emotional side of their brain," said Golden. The solution is finding a way to help soothe the customer's emotions and get them back to their rational brain. It’s counterintuitive to spend extra time soothing the customer, but this often helps the call go shorter.

Golden has some very good suggestions for doing this. Check out her full explanation at 6:09 in the interview.

How can contact centers make call control easier for agents?

Contact center agents are often hampered by cumbersome procedures or inflexible systems. Golden relayed a story about her own experience as a contact center manager.

When Golden listened to agent calls, she quickly noticed a problem.

"My agents had to ask seven questions before they could get to the problem," said Golden. This made the calls sound more like an interview or even an interrogation, rather than a conversation.

The key to fixing this problem is using a call flow and computer system that is flexible enough to allow you to solve the issue in a non-linear fashion.

"If the customer started out with their story, you could jump right to notes and record while they talk," said Golden. You could then go back and ask for the required information once the customer had shared their story. This led to a more conversational tone, and also limited the amount of times a rep had to interrupt the customer to get required information.

Hear more at the 9:57 mark in the interview.

What can agents do to keep calls on track?

Golden provided several suggestions that can be used, depending on the situation.

When a customer is friendly and talkative, she recommends giving a polite, but minimal response. "I live in Oklahoma. During tornado season, you'd be surprised at how many people ask about the weather. I could talk for 20 minutes about that."

A minimal response to a question about tornadoes might be, "Yes, we did have tornados last night, but fortunately the damage was minimal."

You can then redirect the call back to the issue at hand. I really could have used that technique with my talkative customer back in the day!

Golden gives some additional tips for getting a call back on track when the customer is really angry. Check them out at 13:37 in the interview.

Additional Resources

You can get more resources, check out Golden's blog, and learn more about Golden's customer service training programs on her website.

Golden's LinkedIn Learning course on call control is outstanding, and I highly recommend it for anyone who serves customers over the phone.

Three Ways to Effortlessly Cut Average Handle Time

Tell me if this has happened to you.

You have an urgent service issue, so you decide to call. The interactive voice response system (IVR) prompts you to enter some basic account information like the last four digits of your social security number.

The real frustration begins once you (finally) get a live agent on the phone and they ask you for the same information all over again.

Chances are, you got a little frustrated. "Why do I need to give you all this information?! Can't you just solve my problem?"

That led to a 30 second explanation full of nonsense about security, system limitations, and hints about evil bosses who will throw a fit if they don't verify it's really and truly you. It doesn’t make you feel any better, and you realize you just wasted more time.

The whole thing is a terrible experience.

And if your contact center is doing this to customers, you're also wasting precious handle time by not empowering your agents to serve people faster.

I’m going to show you three ways to fix that by providing more authority, resources, and procedures. But first, let’s look at how contact centers are wasting time.

How do contact centers waste time?

There are a number of common practices that waste time in contact centers. Some are overt, while others are more subtle. Here's a partial list:

• Not using caller ID to help verify the caller and pull up the customer record.

• Asking customers to share or verify data you don't use.

• Poor agent typing skills.

• Weak knowledge bases that cause agents to hunt for information.

• Lack of call control skills that would help agents effectively move the call.

There's another big one contact center leaders don't talk about. It's called priming, and it's a growing problem.

Here's a quick definition of priming from Psychology Today:

Priming is a phenomenon in which exposure to a stimulus, such as a word or image, influences how one responds to a subsequent, related stimulus.

The issue starts in other channels like self-service, social media, or chat which are frequently not optimized. Customers eventually give up and decide to call, which they often associate with wasting time.

Then your IVR steps in. Customers associate it with wasting even more time. So their frustration grows when they punch in menu options or try to get the speech recognition software to understand them.

Your poor agent now has an even angrier customer on the line when they finally get connected. And angry customers take longer to serve.

So your IVR is adding talk time, but your agents aren’t empowered to skip the script and give some of that time back. In fact, they're often required to waste more customer time, right at the start of the call by asking for a lot of nonsense before getting down to business.

What is agent empowerment?

An empowered agent is given more than just authority. They are enabled to provide exceptional customer service. 

Agents need three elements to be fully empowered:

• Authority

• Resources

• Procedures

Given the right empowerment, it would be easy for many contact centers to cut at least 15 seconds off their average handle time while improving the agent experience.

How can you quickly cut average handle time?

Let's take a look at the authority, resources, and procedures that can help agents provide better, faster service to their phone customers.

Authority

Allow agents to skip meaningless confirmation data. A customer calling to check the status of their order shouldn't need to share their mother's maiden name, favorite movie, and secret pin number just to get an answer. 

Here's how my dentist office verified my information when I called to schedule a cleaning appointment:

1. The employee used caller ID to identify me and pull up my file.

2. She asked, "Is this Jeff?"

3. The employee then asked me if my insurance had changed.

That was it. Quick and easy, and on to business.

The key was empowering the employee to understand what information needed to be verified. The nature of my call, scheduling an appointment, didn't require a lot of verification. It would have been understandable if she had to ask a lot of security questions in exchange for sharing sensitive information from my file.

Resources

We need to give our agents better tools to serve customers quickly. Here are just a few that would cut down on customer frustration and decrease handle time:

• An IVR that only requests information that's actually used.

• A better knowledge base so agents can quickly access information.

• Improved scheduling so agents are more available.

There are a surprising number of opportunities for contact centers to improve scheduling. Contact center expert Brad Cleveland shared several practical tips in an interview.

Procedures

Call control is becoming a lost art in the contact center.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept, it's a set of techniques for efficiently moving the call along in a way that the customer is happy with. It requires the agent to balance making the customer feel good with getting the job done quickly.

This short video introduces you to a few call control techniques.

Control the call with friendliness from Phone-Based Customer Service by Jeff Toister

Take Action

You don't need to believe me. Try an experiment for yourself. Start by dividing your agents into two groups:

• Group A: have them do things the way they've always done them.

• Group B: give them more authority, resources, and procedures to cut handle time.

Run your experiment over the course of two weeks. Look at the data in three areas to see how Group B compares to Group A:

• Handle time: Do the new techniques reduce average handle time?

• Quality: Do the new techniques improve or reduce call quality?

• Service: Are customers happier when the new techniques are used?

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How to Train Faster and Better with Microlearning

Contact centers constantly face pressure to make agent training faster, cheaper, and better. One way to achieve this is through microlearning, where agents learn new information or review content in small chunks at a time.

Chance are, you're using microlearning already.

For example, have you ever gone to YouTube to find a short how-to video? I did this when I had to change the battery on my solar-powered keyboard. I quickly found a short video and, a few minutes later, I had step-by-step instructions for doing the repair.

I recently joined Bryan Naas from Lessonly to present a webinar on how to train contact center agents faster, reduce costs, and deliver better results with microlearning. Lessonly builds easy-to-use training software that helps people do better work, so it was really helpful to have Bryan's perspective.

Here are a few highlights from the webinar.

Training and Reinforcement

Bryan and I shared multiple microlearning examples throughout the webinar. 

A simple one is my Customer Service Tip of the Week email. Anyone can sign up for free to receive one tip via email, once per week. These tips are helpful reminders to help us build lasting habits.

Budget-Friendly

Microlearning is generally inexpensive and can be deployed quickly.

The biggest cost associated with traditional classroom training is paying agents to attend training along with other agents to provide coverage while your staff is in class. One benefit of microlearning is you don't need to take your agents out of the queue for training, so it is far less disruptive to your operation!

A Proven Model

Bryan shared Lessonly's Better Work Method, which is a model contact center leaders can use to easily develop microlearning lesson plans. 

The first step in the model is to assess needs. It's very common for contact center training programs to deliver too much unnecessary contact, while omitting essential lessons. A simple assessment can help you deliver the right content at just the right time.

You can watch the entire webinar replay here.

Bryan and I mention a couple of links during the webinar that you can't see on the replay:

• Customer Service Tip of the Week

• Lessonly Demo

Lessons Learned from My First Contact Center Jobs

I have the honor of speaking at the NorthEast Contact Center Forum conference in Foxborough, Massachusetts later today.

My first contact center job was in Massachusetts. In fact, I worked at three in total while living in Mass, so this conference is a homecoming of sorts for me. The experience taught me a lot of lessons that are still useful today.

This post is a look back on what I learned from those jobs.

This is likely what I looked like when I started working on contact centers.

Fawcett Energy: Hire the Right People

It was the summer of 1995, and I needed a job—fast. 

A job offer fell through at the last moment. Desperate to find a way to pay my rent, I responded to a newspaper ad titled, "Talented Talkers." 

It was an outbound telemarketing job for Cambridge-based Fawcett Energy. My role consisted of cold calling families on Cape Cod and trying to sell them home heating oil. If the person said they didn't have an oil furnace, I next tried to pitch them on a new sealcoating for their driveway. "Gotta keep the boys working in the summer!"

When that struck out, my last pitch was a lawn greening service. It's amazing how many people don't have lawns, or so they say.

The owner, Red Fawcett, took me to lunch on my first day and I remember being impressed with him. He seemed like a successful business person who took an interest in employees.

But I was instantly miserable. Cold calling just wasn't my thing. I cringed before each call.

My first evening on the job, the computer dialed the home phone for one of Fawcett's competitors. Oh boy did I get it good from them. "Hey honey!" said the man who answered the phone to his wife. "Some kid from Fawcett is calling us. Do we need a new home heating oil supplier?!" 

I heard peels of laughter before they hung up on me.

The biggest lesson I learned is you need to hire people who will love to do what you ask them to do. A lot of people are like me in that they end up working in a contact center just because they need a job.

A coworker seemed like a natural. He shrugged off each rejection knowing it was just a matter of time before he got a sale. He was the type of person Fawcett needed to hire, not me.

Fortunately, I soon landed a three month contract doing market research for a company in Dublin, Ireland and left Fawcett after just two weeks. 

Aramark Uniform: Build Relationships & Be Resourceful

Two years later, I landed a job as a national account manager for Aramark's uniform division, located in Norwell.

My job was to grow sales within my assigned accounts and handle any customer service issues. We were also part of an inbound phone queue, so new customers calling our general line would get routed to whichever account manager happened to be available.

Here I learned the value of building relationships.

We were plagued by long lead times, uneven quality, and high prices. I had to soothe a lot of angry customers at first. Eventually, I learned how to anticipate my customers' needs and find ways to prevent problems and keep them happy.

I also built internal relationships, making friends in accounting, finance, merchandising, and other departments. This was essential because the fastest way to get things done was often to go straight to the person doing it. 

Resourcefulness was another lesson. 

Our factory embroidered logos on uniforms for customers. We had a minimum order size of six since our smallest machine handled six at a time. The production team wanted to maximize efficiency, but this also meant turning away a lot of small orders.

This was a problem for me, since my biggest account had many small offices that only needed one or two uniforms at a time. The solution I pitched to the production team was to hold orders from multiple locations for an extra day or two until we had enough to meet the minimum. This kept both my customers and the production team happy.

Unfortunately, long lead times, quality issues, and high prices caught up with the company. Quite a few of us were eventually laid off.

Chadwicks of Boston: Experiment

Training was my passion, and Chadwicks represented an amazing opportunity.

Two weeks after getting laid off from Aramark, I found myself managing the training team for two contact centers, one in West Bridgewater and the other in Taunton.

This was during the dark ages of contact center management, when every interaction was tightly scripted and the most important metric for agents was talk time. Employees knew they would get in trouble if their average call length went too long.

Fortunately, my boss let me try new experiments to see what worked.

One of my first projects was to re-write our new hire training curriculum. I had heard about some accelerated learning techniques, such as whole-task training, and I convinced my boss to try them out. We immediately saw decreased training time and improved performance.

Another project focused on getting our sales agents to offer a branded credit card to pre-approved customers. The average acceptance rate was just 5 percent at the start of the project.

Some agents were successful on 40 percent or more of their pitches, so I decided to see what they were doing differently. Those lessons helped us quickly boost the acceptance rate from 5 to 20 percent.

Applying Lessons Learned

A colleague once remarked, "There's a big difference between having twenty years of experience and having one year experienced twenty times."

Her point was that we should all be learning from our daily experiences. We risk getting stuck in a rut and watching the world pass us by if we don't.

I continue to share a lot of these stories and examples today, while continuing to learn from my new experiences as well.

If you are attending the conference, please make sure you say "Hi." It will be great to see you there.