Use A Telephone Script That Highlights Your Strengths!

Use A Telephone Script That Highlights Your Strengths!

I’ve said many times that using scripts in telephone selling, customer service, and technical support is both desirable and inevitable.

Even if we claim we’re not using a call path, if we record ourselves during the course of a shift and play back the results, we’ll find recurring regularities, phrases and hooks, explanations and closes that seem to work for us time and again.

They’re just not written down-yet.

When we talk about using scripts, we’re aspiring to reach a degree of UNIFORMITY in text, tone, and timing, and the typical goal set by managers is that everyone will be doing everything the same way, garnering the same great results all around.

All that manager has to do is walk through the call center, and like a symphony conductor, he’ll detect who is sticking to the score and who is striking false notes.

I’ve created, managed in, and worked on the phones in very structured environments like this. You do your selling or servicing “The House’s Way” or it’s the highway!

But there are alternatives, if we’re sophisticated in our scripting and management strategies. Literally, we can let a thousand presentations “bloom,” enabling each telephone rep to do his or her own thing with the full blessing of management.

We can allow each rep to write his or her personal script, providing:

(1) It meets or beats the selling power of a “control” script, one that has been proven to produce top outcomes;

(2) The rep sticks to THAT script, effectively “contracting” to use it time and again until she officially revises it, and beats its achievement with a new text; and

(3) There is obviously no other better call path in use that would neatly adapt to the rep’s native personality and style.

After working in telephone communication for many moons, I have seen that the best script in the world is utterly wasted if people refuse to use it. If they speed read it, shove it in a drawer or obliterate it from their computer screens while saying, “Hey-It’s just not ME!” you have a problem, if you are their manager.

“Try it, you’ll like it!” might get some reluctant reps to bite, but many will simply stare you down with the implied or flatly stated remark, “If I have to use that, I’ll quit!”

Then you have to wear the AUTHORITARIAN’S HAT, which is seldom pleasant.

A way to get around this is to CHALLENGE reluctant reps to BEAT THE CONTROL.

You can reward them. Spiff them with a bonus, if they succeed.

But if they fail, you win and they win, too.

They’ll realize it isn’t easy to draft a script that consistently generates the best sales and service outcomes.

The light may go on, and they might realize, “This might work for me, after all!”

That is what is referred to as a “teachable moment.”

But let’s talk specifics. If you’re going to write your own script, it should bring out your strengths.

For instance, if you are great at chit-chat, at making small talk to warm-up cold prospects, then provide ample room in your script for this feature, this strength. On the other hand, if you’re a cold fish when it comes to breaking the ice, then make this section nonexistent.

Never ask a prospect “How are you?”

If you’re wonderful at asking questions, TV’s Charlie Rose but transplanted into phone conversations, then use what I call The New Telemarketing(TM), a method of selling that involves meaningful give-and-take with the customer.

If you’re the exact opposite, you’re a TELLER, whose mantra could be: “Don’t interrupt me now; I’m on a roll!” then use Traditional Telemarketing, more of a one-way message strategy that depends on you to do the telling and the selling.

You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?

If I had a call center with 100 seats and 100 people simultaneously doing 100 different scripts, I’d be happy, providing they all achieved uniformly great results.

But, if I had a call center with 100 seats and 100 people did 10,000 different scripts during the course of a shift, which is a very real temptation if they’re given freedom to craft their own talks but they stray from them, I’d be rightly concerned, and my sales, service, and tech support results would suffer.

If you’d like to learn more about implementing a multi-style scripting strategy, as well as the nuts and bolts regarding how to put traditional and New Telemarketing(TM) scripts together, contact me and ask about The PhoneMasters(TM) Training Program.

It combines audio and video training with individualized scripting help and telephone coaching.

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