How Does the Brain Influence Agents’ Phone Manner?

Dick Bourke looks at what the key areas of an agent’s brain are doing during a call.

The frontal lobe is the seat of creativity

The frontal lobe takes up 41% of the brain and is the seat of much of our thinking, judgement and creativity. Your agents will need to think on their feet when a question from a customer is off-script. Do they treat all calls the same or quickly learn the nature of the call and caller?

Their tone of voice could be a make-or-break element of the call. When a customer asks a tricky question, there may be a clever workaround that the agent could suggest, perhaps coming up with something on the spot.

The frontal lobe is probably the most engaged part of your agent’s brain. Your agents will have to use their judgement on calls where the conversation takes a more antagonistic turn.

The parietal lobe is key to communication skills

An agent’s choice of language and tone makes a difference to the outcome. You can script a conversation and you can train agents to respond to many different types of call, but their choice of language will impact on how the caller perceives that interaction.

This might sound a little obvious, but let’s not underestimate the importance of being able to read while under pressure on a call. During a call this part of their brain is hard at work. Don’t forget how difficult it can be to cite information from detailed terms and conditions with that kind of pressure.

The temporal lobe enables empathy

This is where our feelings live and where we store short-term memories. Showing empathy could be the difference between a successful or a negative call.

Empathy comes more naturally to some of your agents. Identify those who aren’t as strong in this area and work with them to help them understand the impact.

Learning is of course important. There is the initial getting-up-to-speed training that they will need to go through and then there is the information specific to the interaction that must be learnt on the the job.

With thanks to Dick Bourke at Scorebuddy