Questioning and listening skills
Featured in the Call Centres: Maximising Performance training manual
By Tony Lockwood
Category: Sales Skills
Credit price: 3 download credits (Single user)
Effective communication skills are a must in any role. In a call centre environment, questioning and listening skills are a prerequisite of effective performance. Good questioning and listening skills are paramount in ensuring that accuracy and efficiency levels are maximised within any customer service environment. We need to understand exactly what our customer wants us to do, and to enable us to have this understanding we must ask the relevant questions and listen very carefully to the response. To make matters even more interesting, we need to hear what the customer is not saying as well as what they are saying! This training activity provides a background to communicating with our customers, and methods with which participants can analyse their own skills and build upon them to improve the standard of service within the organisation.
The training activity opens with a discussion on the three key communication skills vital to successful relationships with customers. Participants then discuss in groups what they understand by the term ‘build and maintain rapport’, and how they would try to achieve this in the workplace to build a foundation for effective communication. The next exercise involves creating an active listening environment by pairing up the participants and asking them to sit still for 5 minutes with their eyes shut. There are a number of active listening exercises. These are followed by discussions about what active listening involves, the barriers to active listening and how to overcome them. The activity moves on to questioning skills. The participants define the benefits of effective questions and link them directly to their own organisation. The three main types of questions are covered – open, probing and closed – followed by a variety of exercises designed to test the participants’ understanding and ability to phrase relevant questions in particular situations. Throughout the training activity, participants are involved in group and individual exercises, and your role, as trainer, is to facilitate discussions and guide the exercises to ensure transfer of learning.
Who is it for: Effective questioning and listening skills are a must in any role, but in a call centre they are a prerequisite to effective performance. This training activity is intended for use by trainers to help call centre agents to understand and develop these ski
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 4 |
| Max Group Size: | 8 |
| Typical Duration: | 03:00:00 |
| No of Pages: | 17 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Purpose: This training activity is intended for use by trainers with all members of call centre staff. It enables experienced participants to review their present level of skills and guides more recently appointed staff to an understanding of the impact of excellent communication skills on their day-to-day dealings with their customers. Participants with line-management responsibilities should find the activities an invaluable support in their role of coach and appraiser.
Download the training activity, Questioning and listening skills as featured in the Fenman training manual; Call Centres: Maximising Performance