Active listening exercises are something every contact center agent should be familiar with. By actively listening to consumers, companies build stronger relationships with their audience. Active listening doesn’t just show respect and empathy to clients; it reveals valuable insights too.
Most companies today know they need to capture and understand the voice of the customer to deliver exceptional service. Training agents to listen actively to callers is the first step in determining what they need. Active listening reveals pain points and goals, intent, and sentiment.
It also helps to increase customer loyalty and retention by helping agents build rapport and relationships with each consumer.
Of course, demonstrating active listening skills in today’s fast-paced contact center landscape can be complex. That’s why we’re sharing valuable exercises and strategies designed to turn your agents into active listening experts.
What is Active Listening? The Basics
Listening to a customer and hearing what they say are very different things.
There are various types of listening, from “appreciative listening” when we listen to music or motivational speakers to “comprehensive listening” when we listen to learn. Active listening is about listening to understand.
It’s a form of “empathetic” listening which allows people to build stronger relationships, dive deeper into a person’s words, and see the sentiment or intent behind statements.
When contact center agents practice active listening, they focus exclusively on what the other person says. This means they’re not planning what they will say next or checking their email during the conversation. They’re actively gathering information.
According to psychological research, three primary qualities define active listening:
- Undivided attention: Complete focus on the speaker.
- Comprehension: Ensuring you understand what’s being said.
- Positive intention: The desire to learn from the conversation.
The Benefits of Active Listening in the Contact Center
Active listening takes effort. It requires agents to engage in their conversation with each customer on a deeper level. At a time when many agents are struggling with high volumes of calls and using AI to streamline interactions, the benefits of active listening are often forgotten.
However, while customers want fast and efficient interactions with customer service, they also want to feel heard. Active listening is crucial to showing empathy and human compassion.
PWC found up to 59% of all consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience. Active listening brings the human connection back into the conversation.
It can help build trust, establish rapport, and strengthen consumer connections. It also has an impact on employee productivity and efficiency. Rather than just “assuming” they know what customers need, agents can use active listening to diagnose their problems.
This means they spend less time reacting to what they think they know and more time focusing on what the customer wants and needs.
Active Listening Exercises for Contact Center Interactions
Active listening, like empathy or compassion, is a soft skill that takes time to develop. Some contact center agents are already excellent at demonstrating active listening. Others are so focused on reducing average handling times and wait times that they overlook this skill.
Fortunately, there are a few simple active listening exercises any agent can use in the contact center to engage consumers better:
1. Never Interrupt
One of the easiest ways to demonstrate active listening is to avoid “jumping in” during a customer’s sentence. Sometimes, when conversations are flowing, it’s tempting to dive in and add your input. If a customer mentions an issue with billing, you might be tempted to suggest transferring them to the financial department straight away.
However, interruptions cause frustration for customers. It can take a while for a caller to get to the root cause of their problem. Allowing them to fully explain the situation before getting involved ensures they feel respected and heard.
There are various active listening exercises contact center professionals can use to overcome the desire to interrupt. You can try putting yourself on mute while someone else speaks or consider taking notes rather than speaking out loud during a conversation.
2. Listen without judgment
Listening without judgment is another core component of active listening. Being non-judgmental during a conversation doesn’t mean simply ignoring adverse reactions to statements. It means listening carefully to someone else’s words without any emotional response.
Listening without judgment is helpful for a few reasons. It reduces the desire to interrupt and challenge a statement or thank a customer immediately for positive feedback. It also helps to prevent your mind from straying away from the conversation to start formulating responses.
With active listening exercises, agents can practice listening without judgment. For instance, they could ask a colleague to tell them a story filled with positive and negative statements. During that conversation, they can focus on training their mind to disregard emotional responses so that they can focus exclusively on the following sentence.
3. Summarize and paraphrase
Active listening does require some back and forth. To be truly engaged and involved in a conversation, agents need to occasionally ask for clarity. Paraphrasing and summarization are excellent active listening exercises agents can use to enhance the quality of a conversation.
For instance, when a customer finishes speaking, try repeating what they said back to them. Don’t repeat the statement word for word. Instead, share what you’ve gleaned from their message. If a customer talks about an issue with a software update, you could say:
“I’m hearing that you have a problem with the latest update. Is that right?” This allows the customer to confirm you’re both on the same page. It also helps to ensure each customer feels heard and understood.
4. Use positive nonverbal cues
Phone conversations and chat aren’t the only forms of communication in the contact center today. Increasingly, many customers are also reaching out to agents via video. This brings nonverbal communication back into the active listening process.
If you’re interacting with a customer over video, pay attention to how you present yourself. Active listening exercises like attempting to make eye contact or looking at the camera during the conversation show customers your focus is entirely on them.
You can also smile and nod when appropriate, straighten your shoulders, and show concern in your facial expression. Above all else, avoid looking away from the customer or fidgeting when they’re speaking. Ensure they can see they have your full attention.
5. Ask open-ended questions
Questions can play an essential role in many contact center conversations. They’re how agents get to the bottom of a problem and ensure they fully understand what the customer is saying. Once the customer you’re talking to finishes their thought, ask a question to dive deeper into the problem.
You can avoid showing judgment with your questions by ensuring they’re open-ended. For instance, you might say, “What made you pursue that option?” or “What could I do to help with that?”
If you think you know how to resolve the issue the customer is having, you could say something like, “If I did [X], would that resolve the problem?”
Active Listening Exercises for Contact Center Teams
Active listening is something agents can practice in virtually every customer interaction or conversation. Even agents dealing with a customer through a messaging app can still use specific exercises, like waiting for customers to finish typing before they jump in.
Outside of customer interactions, business leaders can also use various active listening exercises to train teams collaboratively. For instance:
1. Listen and repeat
Divide your contact center agents into pairs, and ask each person to tell their partner a story or talk about something important to them for 3 minutes. After the speaker finishes, the listener can paraphrase what they heard in their own words.
This activity teaches agents to show patience, and avoid interrupting other speakers. It also pushes them to genuinely listen to what’s being said because they know they need to repeat the story in their own words later. They focus on the message rather than what to say in response.
2. Storytime
For this active listening exercise, ask one group member to narrate a story while everyone else listens. Once the story is over, give every participant a series of questions to answer. This activity will show whether each person listened well enough to understand what they were being told.
Similarly, you could ask everyone on your team to watch a video, then re-write the story from that video in their own words. This helps encourage agents to focus on what they’re being told and trains their brains to collect valuable information.
3. Train of words
Like the kid’s game “Chinese whispers,” this is one of the fun active listening exercises contact center leaders can use. It involves asking participants to sit in a circle; then, one person whispers a sentence to the person on their right or left. The following person shares the sentence, and so on. Finally, the last person reveals the message.
Although the exact sentence might not be the same at the end, it should convey the same underlying meaning, showing each person listened carefully.
Bringing Active Listening to the Contact Center
Ultimately, active listening exercises train agents to be more empathetic, compassionate, and effective representatives of a business. In a world of automation and AI, customers still crave genuine human connections and interactions. With active listening, agents can build deeper customer relationships and improve their chances of rapidly solving problems.
