Effective Collection Call Scripts for Better Recovery

Contact centres are the first source of communication for customers and when customers call them, they expect an accurate, speedy and appropriate resolution for their concerns. When there are pre-defined scripts, it helps the brands ensure consistency. Brands make sure that every customer gets the same experience every time by giving scripts to their agents.

The following are what the scripts ensure:

• Information given to customers is consistently accurate
• Tone, style and voice is that of the brand instead of each individual agent
• Emotion of the call is positive
• Saves time and reduces errors
• Helps agents improve their productivity

One of the most important advantages is Increasing productivity: With scripts, agents are able to attend to more callers every day. They are able to answer the right questions and address concerns in the right direction. They ensure all possibilities are considered before offering a resolution and they are able to resolve issues without having to ask another agent or escalate to a manager.

Let us understand how to write effective call centre scripts:

Have a precise opening: Communication is the most important key here. Agents needs to ensure that the caller is welcome and reassured. This includes greeting the caller, introducing the agent himself, informing him if the call is recorded and opening the floor for questions.

Keep scripts short and easy to skim: The agent should be able to understand the scripts in a limited span of time and hence it is important to keep them non complex in order for the agent to skim through and understand. Lengthy scripts can be time consuming and frustrating.

Highlight key phrases or statements: Colour-coding, highlighting or even using different fonts for important points in the script will help easy navigation. One can avoid monotony of speech by highlighting words that need to be emphasised.

Be specific: Be prepared with all the possible questions and problems your customers might face and develop different scripts for each of them. To enable this, keep updating your scripts regularly for emerging scenarios.

Personalise: Sometimes, the scripts can be mechanical and hence agents can tweak it and ask personal questions related to family health or the weather conditions, etc. This basically helps in lightening up the mood.

Keep it positive: This is very important as the tone should be positive throughout. This is to ensure that the customers feel happy and satisfied after the call and not emotionally drained.

Key things to keep in mind during all of this is:

• Show empathy to your callers
• Measure the response at the end of the day
• Listen and negotiate along with personalization whenever needed
• Understand the reasons for default and accordingly address the solutions

Agents should explore positive scripting for their consumers. Positive scripting is the process of designing a customer service script and formulating a message so as not to frustrate or upset your customers. It can also be used to guide a customer towards a desired outcome. For example, up-selling a customer to a premium-rate contract instead of a standard-rate one.

There are some questioning techniques that should be followed. Asking the right questions at the right time is an invaluable skill for customer service teams. Let us explore some of the options below:

• Open and closed question: advisors are often recommended to ask open questions as often as possible and then to follow up with a closed question when they want to confirm their understanding of something. Open questions are like “how”, “when”, “why”, “where”.
• Funnel questions: This starts with open questions and move on to probing questions and close with conclusions. Probing questions are generally to understand the backend story.

The collection centres should check the metrics to understand how the performance and approach is. Some of metrics are:

1. Customer satisfaction: This is generally simple and easy to operate, but there is no universally recognised approach to measuring Customer Satisfaction. It can be carried out through a wide range of methods, the most common being a post-call IVR survey or a follow-up email survey.
2. First Contact Resolution: This is a very common metric and looks at how many times a customer needs to call a company to get a problem resolved. It is also a very good way of measuring a problem from the customer’s perspective.
3. Quality scores: Typically, a contact centre would have a “quality team” that will listen to the recordings of five or six calls per advisor every month. They would then fill in a scorecard, ticking boxes to indicate whether the advisor was able to do things like greet the customer kindly, show empathy and so on.
4. Service Level: This looks at the percentage of calls that are answered within a given time.
5. Adherence: Adherence is a metric that calculates a percentage figure for the amount of time an advisor spends working compared to their schedule – whether that’s on the phone, completing after-call work (ACW) or any other scheduled activities.
6. Sales volume: Sales volume is the number of sales that an advisor or a contact centre makes over the course of a certain time period or per X number of contacts. While this is simple to calculate, sales volume in the contact centre is usually measured in terms of: Units – e.g. The number of mobile phones sold in a week, Subscriptions – e.g. The number of magazine subscriptions signed in a week, Hours – e.g. The number of hours secured for a consultant each month.

Setting targets, encouraging positive behaviour and creating an atmosphere that prizes self-development will not only have positive repercussions on the employees but will also impact the bottom line in a positive direction. This in turn will keep the employees and the customers elated and satisfied with the brand.