What this episode is about
This one was back to brass tacks: tone. We work for brands, so our agents have to be an extension of that brand, and that comes down to how they sound on the phone. I walked through five things we look at to make sure our agents' tone is where it needs to be.
It starts with hiring. Define what you're looking for, forget the resume for a minute and actually have a conversation with the candidate on the phone. Naturally engaging, empathetic people are getting harder to find, so if you're looking for that, make sure your interview questions match it.
Then training. We role-play every segment, starting with the opening. There's a skill to "thank you for calling." I tell every class the tone is the message. You can have an agent who gives the customer the right result and still has low CSAT and sentiment, next to an agent who had to tell customers no all day long and scores higher because their tone was right.
Most organizations don't score and measure tone. When I consult and ask to see the QA form, it's greeting, disclosure, probing questions, the black-and-white items, and very rarely anything on tone. We use speech analytics to score sentiment on our inbound calls, and it correlates closely with CSAT. That also gives us a way to incentivize attitude, which is the harder of our two culture pillars, attitude and effort, to measure. And I trust sentiment more than a survey, because a customer can hammer an agent on CSAT for a company policy the agent couldn't change.
The second half is live Q&A from LinkedIn, covering how QA and floor supervisors should split roles, and agent well-being and burnout.
Key takeaways
- The tone is the message: the right answer in the wrong tone still lowers CSAT and sentiment.
- Hire for tone with a phone conversation, not just a resume.
- Role-play tone through every segment of training, not only at the end.
- Put tone on the QA form; most forms only score the black-and-white items.
- Use sentiment scores to measure and reward tone, alongside CSAT and NPS.
In Tom's words
“The tone is the message”Tom Laird · 06:29
“the person with the unbelievable tone that had to tell no all day long to customers”Tom Laird · 06:56
“can I see your QA form? Can I see what you're using to score agents?”Tom Laird · 09:46
“very rarely do I see some type of scoring on tone.”Tom Laird · 09:59
Transcript excerpt
These excerpts come from an automatic transcript and are lightly edited for readability (filler and obvious transcription errors removed). For exact wording, listen at the timestamp.
[06:29]It's all in the tone, right? And you'll hear me say it a billion times. The tone is the message.
[09:33]Most organizations don't actually score and measure tone. When I go consult, I'll say, hey, can I see your QA form? Can I see what you're using to score agents? It's probably greeting. It's disclosure. It's ask probing questions. It's all of these black and white type things, but very rarely do I see some type of scoring on tone.
[14:15]We have two pillars of culture at Expivia, attitude and effort. Effort is easier. You can do things on attendance, on average handle time. But how do you do attitude? It's so subjective. And this is why analytics for us has been just a panacea.