Rapport

Rapport is a good sense of understanding and trust. If you have good rapport with customers, most probably, you will be able to achieve better results throughout the assistance process. This is why it is so important to build rapport with every customer, above all if they come to us requesting help. These are some tips that may come handy in order to improve rapport:

• Avoid using words such as Fail, above all if you are telling customers that they failed doing something. This sounds very negative and does not help to achieve a good relationship with the customer:

• Don’t state: You failed to renew the service.

• Instead, state: The service was not renewed on time, but fortunately you can reactivate your service…

• Don’t state: You failed to provide valid proofs.

• Instead, state: The proofs received are not valid, but you can submit new ones and I can check them right away…

As you can see, in both examples above, if we avoid placing the customer as the subject of the sentence and we use the impersonal mode, the explanation will not sound as negative. Apart from that, in both cases we keep on providing further information, because every time we need to deliver bad news to the customer, we MUST provide a positive statement afterwards, in which we can detail the solution to the customer’s concern or, at least, offer help. 

• Don’t use phrases, such as You didn’t fill in the application correctly or You were not able to do it correctly. Once again, the structure is not appropriate to address a customer. Instead, agents should rephrase these statements:

• The application has some mistakes, but nothing to worry, you can create a new one with the correct information and I can guide you through the enrollment creation.

• There are some things that we need to fix in the application.

Once again, always provide a positive statement right after delivering bad news. If possible, provide the positive statement along with the rest of the information. If you provide the bad news first, and then you take some time writing the positive statement, in the meantime, customers will only read the bad news and will not see any resolution, which may led them to think that we cannot help them or do not want to solve their concern. Do not give them the impression that we do not want to assist them or that we cannot do anything. So don’t forget the positive statement!