6 call centre script best practices

Your customer service team is made up of a variety of humans, each with different levels of knowledge. That comes with risk. Someone who is new or unfamiliar with a certain issue could say the wrong thing and fail to provide the solution a customer needs.

What is a script in a call centre?

A call centre script is a script that clearly lays out what a contact centre agent is supposed to say in response to a specific problem.

Why use a call centre script?

Companies use call centre scripts in the hopes of realising a few key benefits:

• A shortcut to help an agent find and provide the right answer during a customer interaction, boosting resolution time and productivity.
• A way to ensure each customer service representative provides the same answer to a problem, creating a consistent customer experience.
• A failsafe to keep agents from going rogue on difficult calls and saying something inaccurate, or worse, inappropriate.

If you provide each customer service rep with the exact words to say, surely you don’t have to worry about them ever getting a call wrong. Right?

Well, it’s more complicated than that.

Call centre script risks

While call centre scripts can serve these purposes, they also present a couple of issues that can lead to a bad customer experience and a bad reputation for your call centre.

• Agent scripting that sounds robotic

  We live in the age of self service. 81% of customers try to find an answer to their problems before they take the step of calling you. By the time they pick up the phone, they want a human’s help. If what they get it someone reading off the same answer they could have found online, they won’t feel you’re treating them like a human with a unique issue.

  And customers can tell when a customer service agent isn’t using their own words. 78% say their experience is better when they can tell the rep isn’t reading from a script.

• A script that doesn’t solve the customer’s problem

  A call centre script is meant to make sure every agent provides the right answer to the problem, but sometimes problems are too complicated to be covered by a script. And contact centre agents still risk pulling up the wrong script based on insufficient information, providing a solution to an entirely different problem. Few things are as frustrating as talking to someone convinced they’ve solved your problem who has actually gotten it wrong.

Best practices for call centre scripts

As with any tool, the effectiveness of using scripts in a call centre is all about how you use them. You can use call scripts as a way to empower your reps and allow them to act as advisors to your customers.

In theatre, a “script” is usually something you memorise and recite word for word. But customer service calls aren’t Shakespeare. If you’re hiring awesome reps, then focus on giving them the tools they need to do a good job and then trust them to create a great customer experience.

1. Prioritise agent training—and make call centre scripts a part of it

   Call centre scripts can be a useful part of training new customer service representatives, but they shouldn’t be used as a replacement for it. Use the scripts you have to provide a helpful suggestion of what agents should say when faced with a particular problem. And supplement that information with soft skills training on how to effectively interact with customers on calls, as well as on live chat.

   Train your agents to treat scripts as something they can consult for guidance, but not something they should read word for word. Over time, they’ll have an easier time knowing what to say with just a quick glance or skim, and can do so in a way that feels more natural and human. A customer interaction with a call centre is much more welcoming when it feels like a natural conversation.

   Turn your call centre “scripts” into knowledge resources that are easy for reps to quickly access

   A script doesn’t have to be a list of lines to say. If you have call centre scripts in that format now, you can repurpose them into formats and channels that make the most important information more accessible to your customer service representatives.

   Use scripting to build out your internal knowledge base, and make it searchable so that agents can more easily find the relevant answer to every question they encounter. You can also break each part of a script down into macros, and tag and categorise answers so that they’re easy for a call centre agent to pull up at a moment’s notice, right when they need it.

   Your agents shouldn’t have to read 500 words in script form to get to the information they need, all while the customer waits on the line. You can use customer service technology to make sure all your resources are well organised and formatted, so it’s easy for reps to find the right information quickly.

   How do you write a call centre script?

   Tips for writing a good call centre script:

   1. Make information searchable so agents can easily find the relevant answer

   2. Break down responses into macros so an agent can pull up a response in a moment’s notice

   3. Focus on organisation and formatting, so it’s easy for reps to find the right information quickly

   Train representatives to make customer experience their top priority

   Where using call centre scripts gets tricky is when customer service agents think they have to prioritize following the script over providing the best customer experience. Make sure your agent training and internal processes for your call centre makes it very clear that is not the case.

   Make sure your call centre scripts are accurate

   The whole point of scripting is to improve accuracy. So if your agents are getting bad or incomplete information from them, they’re hurting more than they’re helping. Use the record of your past customer service interactions when creating call centre scripts.

   Past data will guide you in identifying the main issues customers have, what followup questions and concerns are common, and which responses yield the best customer satisfaction scores. Use that information to create data-backed resources that help your reps provide an improved experience.

2. Make consulting customer data the first step in the “script”

Before an agent starts to launch into any answer, the first step should always be to pull up the information about every interaction that’s come before. If a customer has already talked to another call centre agent (or several), being asked to repeat the same information over and over again is frustrating. Every rep should take time at the beginning of every interaction with a customer to review all the available details first. This both saves the customer time in doing so, and means you have the information needed to find the best resource to help.

How do you start a call centre call?

The first step to a call centre call should always be to pull up relevant customer context, such as a customer’s last interaction or account type. If a customer has to repeat themselves or wait on hold while an agent looks up the details, they’re not going to remember the experience as a positive one.

3. Train agents to keep the communication two way

Part of the problem with scripts is you risk talking at the customer rather than talking with them. The difference has a lot to do with whether or not you’re taking time to really listen to the customer versus trying to jump in with an answer, whether you understand the question or not. Agents should be trained to pause regularly and check in with the customer to make sure they’ve gotten the information right and see if the customer has anything to add.

This can also help agents avoid droning on past the point where a question has been answered. Shorter responses with frequent pauses give customers the chance to let you know when the problem is solved and get off the phone faster, so they can get back to their day.