Live chat is a popular channel used by businesses of all sizes across the globe. But how do you know if your customer support team is having better conversations or not? Are you sure that you’re delivering a consistent experience to your customers?
*Enters customer service scripts*
Customer service scripts help support teams deliver a standardized experience. Using correct scripts and phrases can solve customer queries and deliver a consistent customer experience. Yet, when it comes to customer service scripts, practitioners are as divided as people are about pineapple on a pizza.
Needless to say, the benefits of using customer service scripts are manifold, but there are some severe downsides to it too. Some limitations involve:
- Sounding robotic while responding to customers.
- Sounding apathetic while using generic scripts for all customers.
- Scripts may increase frustration in the customers.
- Scripts may or may not solve customer problems entirely.
On the contrary, wisely using the scripts can be beneficial to your service representatives. 97% of global consumers say that live chat responses are important to them while purchasing from a brand. Some benefits involve:
- They’re a great way to train new team members.
- It is also a great way to provide service reps with a communication guideline that they can refer to whenever they need it.
- Helps provide service reps with on-hand support.
It is important to note that live chats are a bit different from canned responses. Canned responses are generally helpful in answering questions quickly. But they may not necessarily lead to closing a sale. Hence, customer service scripts are an essential part of customer support strategies. But how you frame these strategies is utterly crucial—the right amount of empathy and customer service scripts.
A customer service strategy is vital for all businesses. Especially if you’re in retail or ecommerce, you’ll be speaking to customer-related issues daily. Creating compelling customer service scripts is a part of a robust customer service strategy. Here’s a thorough guide and model to help you frame efficient customer service scripts for your business.
Turn aimless conversations into meaningful interactions! Let us begin:
Customer Service Scripts: A Brief
Customer service scripts are a collection of statements to guide customer service representatives while they interact with customers. It is used to reduce standard errors and helps representatives as they interact.
The use of such scripts reduces common errors and helps representatives in guiding customers accurately. This way, companies can ensure that the language of their script follows their best practices and reflects their brand identity. By employing scripts, your business can communicate better and solve customer problems faster.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Customer Service Scripts
Customer service scripts can be a reliable way to keep your support agents on track and up to speed. But, despite some substantial benefits, many believe that customer service scripts are impersonal and that companies should avoid using them. Here’s a comparative guide:
Advantages:
- Offer a standardized experience
- Reduce employee training time
- Boost agent confidence
- Reducing employee frustration
Disadvantages:
- Customers can easily figure out that it is a script
- Agents may rely too much on scripts
- Lack of flexibility
- Sounding robotic
Advantages of Incisive Customer Service Scripts
As per Software Advice Research, 84% of surveyed customers felt their experience improved “more than slightly” when an agent could answer confidently.
Let’s look at the advantages in detail:
1. Offer a Standardize Experience
Offering an interactive experience every time the customer reaches out to you is crucial. And what better way to provide a consistent experience than customer scripts? Scripting ensures that your brand’s core values are reflected consistently in every customer interaction.
Point to Note: Providing a consistent experience does not mean using the same script repeatedly for all incidents. Make sure that your scripts for various channels have similar elements (such as branding, opening, and closing statements) and yet are personalized upto a certain extent.
2. Reduce Employee Training Time
Let the scripts be a guide for all your new customers and agents. Your agent can simply refer to the saved scripts and save valuable time.
DeskXpand Knowledge Base
Tip of The Day: You can create an internal knowledge base for your agents to easily create, search and edit relevant customer service scripts.
Check out DeskXpand Knowledge Base
Implement a well-built knowledge base today and reduce your customer support cost drastically.
3. Boost Agent Confidence
It is simple to understand that with customer service scripts, agents will be confident and prepared (even for the most challenging questions.) Hence, support reps can pay more attention to what customers say rather than worrying about their next response.
4. Reducing Employee Frustration
When your agents are well-equipped with a knowledge base, helpdesk tools, and customer service scripts, they’ll naturally be less frustrated. They won’t have to answer/ type the same answer again and again. They can have ready-to-answer canned responses or scripts to send to customers.
Disadvantages of Customer Service Scripts
Despite some substantial benefits, many industry experts believe that customer service scripts are impersonal and that businesses should avoid using them. Let’s see why:
1. Customers Can Easily Figure Out Scripts
Robotic tones will not work with customers. They can sense it when a support rep is providing a live experience or simply reading a script. Although they might not tell you, they can quickly lose interest in the conversation.
Customer service scripts can make an agent appear non-human or robotic. This can prevent them from fostering a real connection. To avoid these downfalls, you must encourage agents to strike the right balance and use an empathetic tone for better flexibility.
2. Agents May Rely too Much on Scripts
Customer service scripts are handy, but relying too much on them may give your agents the ability to carry a natural conversation. They might struggle to keep the conversation alive and going during face-to-face interactions.
3. Lack of flexibility
Customer support reps who are passionate may feel that scripts prevent them from modifying the conversation with customers. This, in turn, would prevent them from creating a stronger connection with the customers. Hence the lack of flexibility arises.
How to Overcome this?
The only way to resolve this is personalization. Allow your agents to personalize their responses as and when they need. Give them the flexibility to change scripts as they need in the time of adversity.
Positive Scripting & Best Practices
Positive customer service scripting is designing a customer service script to limit customer frustration and steer the conversation towards a solution rather than fixating on the problem. Positive scripting can be used to help customers and guide them towards the desired outcome. For instance, support reps can use positive words to persuade customers into buying more products and services from the brand. Here are some best practices for positive scripting.
Use More Affirmative Phrases
Positive customer service phrases can create magic. You just need to know what to use when. You can enhance customer engagement, reduce overall churn rate, and increase customer satisfaction rate, simply by using the correct phrases. Exciting, right?
When you have the right collection of phrases at your disposal, it can improve your communication as a customer service professional. Here are some examples of affirmative phrases that you can use for live scripts that’ll make customers happy:
Avoid Using Negative Phrases
Words have the potential to destroy as much as they can empower. With the flash of the word “NO,” the human brain releases stress-producing hormones and neurotransmitters. Yes, customers do not appreciate the use of negative phrases while interacting with a customer service rep.
You must avoid using non-affirmative words during chat conversations, or it will end up being the last conversation. Additionally, negative words may sound rude and worsen the customer experience. Or worse, you might lose potential customers, and a negative word of mouth might further reflect negatively on your brand.
Here are some of the negative phrases to avoid while writing customer service scripts:
More or less, just avoid saying “NO.” Even if you can afford to say no, do it affirmatively by using positive words. You can suggest other resources instead of saying no.
Let me walk you through a wonderful example of winning a customer’s heart affirmatively after turning down their demand.
Company Name: Proposify, A SaaS Company
The CEO of Proposify noticed that a customer was constantly complaining about the software. He noted that the customer was asking for solutions that were not possible to fulfill. After weeks of continuous complaints, the CEO decided to talk to the customer directly. This is the power of being affirmative!
The CEO apologized for this company’s inability to meet the customer’s needs and also offered to provide a refund along with competitors that the customer should try. An ideal way to say NO”. To his surprise, the CEO got the following response:
It is a perfect example and a proper blend of empathy, diplomacy, and affirmation to de-escalate any issue. If you work for the customer’s best interest, the customers will know, and they’ll be delighted. In the beginning, it seemed like Proposify would lose a customer, but they gained a loyal customer and a valuable testimonial instead.
Amazing, right!
Build Customer Service Scripts: Effective Tricks and Best Practices
You must build your customer service scripts carefully, or else it’ll backfire. Here are a few tips to keep in mind while building and using scripts:
1. Understand Your Customer Issue
If your scripts miss making your support efficient and miss customer challenges, there’s no point in having them in the first place. The most crucial task to craft scripts is to understand where the customers are coming from. So, you must put yourself in the customer’s shoes and gauge their needs and overall mindset. This helps to ensure that your scripts do not sound tone-deaf.
2. Leverage the Power of Positive Scripting
Positive scripting is the process of customizing scripts and mapping them to specific situations. It ensures that agents are able to keep the conversation going. You must spend time identifying different scenarios that support agents might find themselves in and build scripts accordingly.
Positive scripting is extremely useful for training recruits. You can make these scripts easy to access by deploying an agent-facing chatbot. This way, newly joined agents can interact with the chatbot to find the best thing to say.
3. Study Past Conversations to Frame the Best Services
You can learn a lot from support agents who consistently maintain higher satisfaction scores. Listen to the recordings of these conversations. Notice the nuances in how they speak and interact with customers and incorporate the learnings in your scripts. You can even borrow words or phrases from these conversations.
Customer Service Scripts: Yay or Nay?
In the end, it all comes down to how the scripts are used. If you use them correctly, they drastically improve agent productivity. The key is in finding out the right balance between being too flexible and too rigid. Plus, it also depends on the flexibility of your helpdesk tool and how often it lets you update customer service scripts.
Engage your customers and improve conversions with the right tools
15+ Ready-to-Use Customer Service Scripts
While greeting a customer
“Welcome to [Brand Name] Customer Service. My name is [First Name]. How can I help you?”
“Good afternoon! You’re through to [Brand Name]. My name is [First Name]. How may I assist you today?”
Hello, [first name], welcome back to “[brand name]. Did you face any further problems with the “earlier issue”?
Welcome back [first name]. Happy to see you again. What can we do for you today?
Always assure that your customers know that the call is being recorded for internal review
Is it okay with you if I put this call on recording? We usually use this for our internal training process.
I would like to mention that we will be recording this chat for the internal training process. Can you confirm if you’re okay with it or not?
Hello, we would like to let you know that this chat/call is monitored or recorded for quality assurance. Please confirm if you’re okay with your call being recorded or not.
Asking for contact details while interacting with customers for the first time
Hi, [first name]. Can you please share your contact details?
Hello, can I please have your contact details to update the process further? Could you kindly provide your phone number, email, etc.?
Post-sales support or feedback
Hi, [first name]. Would you like to know more about the subscriptions for [another product or service name]? I can share the details if you want.
Hi, do you need help with the installation steps of “product name”? I can help with it.
Asking what brings them here
Hello! [first name], What brings you to [brand name]? What are you looking for? It will help us to serve you better.
Good morning [first name], What brings you to [brand name]? Tell us about the source of your problem, and we’ll get back with a solution that works at the earliest.
When you need to make an apology
We’re sorry about the [issue they’ve been facing]. Let me have a word with my manager to find out how we can fix this for you. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
We apologize for the inconvenience you have faced. We’re very sorry. We will take care of the [issue they’ve been facing] on top priority for you.
