Being able to build customer rapport while selling on the phone is arguably harder than during face to face conversatins but it can still be a deciding factor. Your business relies on trust between agents and (potential) customers, and luckily there are various ways to build it.
In this article, you’ll read about the importance of rapport in telesales and four tips you can apply in your contact center to build better relationships with customers.
The importance of building good customer relationships
Rapport refers to the skill of effectively communicating with someone or having a keen sense of trust and understanding. In the context of telesales, establishing rapport is crucial for good customer relationships, increasing sales and achieving business goals.
The significance of customer rapport extends to a personal level, too. Engaging with customers throughout the day can get stressful, especially when dealing with strong emotions or an influx of calls during peak season. In these situations, excellent communication and finding common ground with customers gets increasingly important for meeting business targets and preserving a positive attitude while doing so.
Tips for building customer rapport in telesales
To increase the chance of establishing a good relationship with a potential buyer, it is worth to keep in mind a few things related to both skills and technologies in use.
1. Smile while talking on the phone
Have you ever caught yourself yawning because you saw someone else yawning, too? You’re not alone. Neuroscience explains that we have a natural inclination to mirror others, which is an important concept in sales. If you do not regulate your own mood and emotions, you’re a lot more likely to mirror others. This becomes very risky if you’re on the phone with a frustrated client – you might just end up escalating the situation.
To prevent scenarios like this, think about your reaction as an active choice you make. Respond in a way you’d like the conversation to go. Are you facing rudeness? Be polite. Is the customer irrational? Remain calm and stick to the facts. Do your contacts seem uninterested? Try an enthusiastic tone. And don’t forget to smile while you’re talking to them.
Even though they can’t see it in a phone call, the fact that you’re smiling is noticeable in your tone. It’ll immediately set you up for a positive, friendly interaction, potentially leading to better sales results.
2. Be authentic
Staying authentic and listening to people attentively goes a long way when it comes to building rapport. For example, if a client reschedules a call with you because they’re busy taking their children or pets to an appointment, you can later on follow up and ask how it went. You might be surprised how much this small detail can mean to people, and how much more cooperative they’ll be with you.
3. Stand your ground
Although building rapport can largely contribute to the success of a telesales call, you shouldn’t desperately try to impress the person on the other side of the phone, either. Establish a sense of partnership with them where you’re equal parties. This is especially useful when you deal with particularly difficult clients. Establishing boundaries can even help your sales in these cases, because you’ll come across as consistent and reliable.
4. Use AI for better offers
Apart from working on your soft skills and implementing the practices mentioned above, you can take some extra steps to make sure you approach people with the best possible offers, increasing chances of success. At the end of the day, even if good relationships are established, people rather won’t buy a product or service they don’t really need.
There are various AI-powered features that can help you learn about your customers’ preferences and make tailored offers for them. For example, you can use speech-to-text to quickly turn conversations into text files that are easier to analyze in bulk. As the system transcribes each interaction, it also learns about the history and personal preferences of each contact.
To get the full picture of how past conversations went, sentiment analysis can also be used. With this feature, the AI system can gain an even deeper understanding, as it can observe the emotional tone of the exchange, too. By examining large volumes of voice recordings and their text versions, AI will be able to make accurate suggestions on finetuning your outreach database, as well as what to offer for each customer called, thus boosting your telesales results.
In a nutshell
Building rapport can take many forms in telesales. These were just a few suggestions to get started on establishing positive customer relationships and making successful calls. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, some deeper understanding of call center scripting tools, such as the ones used at VCC Live contact center platform, can help you further finetine your outbound efforts.
Also Read: 5 Tips for Creating and Implementing a Digital Growth Strategy
