Why Is Active Listening Important For Improving Your Customer Service?

Although delivering exceptional customer service requires a mix of different skills, the essential one is active listening. 

To understand why is active listening important, you need to recognize what it helps achieve: it ensures that your customer service reps give the customer their undivided attention, which enables them to perfectly understand their customer’s needs and respond accordingly. 

There’s more to it, though, so continue reading to learn why is active listening important and how it can benefit your entire organization. 

What is active listening?

Active listening is pretty easy to understand - it’s a communication technique often used in call centers aimed at improving customer interactions. The basic premise is that active listening requires you to entirely concentrate on what the customer is saying during the call and make the effort to understand all their questions, needs, and concerns. 

Apart from giving your full attention to the customer, your customer service agent must also provide valuable feedback and clarify any potential misunderstandings that may arise. 

This will allow, among other things, to quickly identify and resolve any issues, which is key for enhancing the overall efficiency of the contact center and your customer service.

The problem is that improving active listening skills is easier said than done, especially when you consider that many reps multitask when talking to customers. Plus, when you’re working eight hours, it gets a lot more challenging to not get distracted by external factors. Heck, many employees get lost in their own thoughts while working. 

Thus, it takes a lot of effort to actively listen to what the customers are saying. 

At the same time, many reps make the mistake of interrupting their customers and cutting them off to respond. This seemingly saves time, but it only accomplishes to drive the wedge between your reps and your customers. 

The two examples provided above are common in call centers and reps often go through the motions when talking to customers. This is why learning about active listening is of value, as it serves as the first step on the road to improvement. 

Benefits of active listening in customer service

Not sure why is active listening important? Consider the following benefits:

1. Strengthens trust and rapport

Are you constantly disappointed by the track record of your call center agents? It’s worth inquiring whether they have trouble building rapport with their customers. 

Active listening is by far the easiest way to establish trust with the customer in a short time. If customers feel the person on the other side is listening to them and addressing their concerns, the experience will most likely stuck. As a result, the same customer is more likely to trust your company. 

2. Improves problem-solving

Active listening is one of the most effective ways to accurately identify the customer’s problem. Consequently, your reps can lean into this by asking relevant questions, allowing them to provide the best solution in line with the customer’s expectations. 

3. Boosts customer satisfaction

When your customers are talking to a customer service representative who listens to their pain points and acknowledges their concerns, they are significantly more likely to be satisfied with the service you offer. 

Not only will this foster customer loyalty, but it may also increase the number of word-of-mouth recommendations.

4. Helps avoid misunderstandings

Misunderstandings between the rep and customers can have a negative impact on first-call resolution rates. Fortunately, active listening can also solve this particular problem. By actively listening (and asking relevant questions), agents can establish an accurate basis of the problems and ultimately resolve the issue effectively. 

How to augment the active listening skills of your agents

Now that you know why is active listening important, let’s quickly go over some tips that will help you boost your agents’ active listening skills.

You can try this:

1. Organize communication workshops

You can sign up your staff for workshops and training sessions that will help them level up their overall communication skills. There is no shortage of things you can do: provide them with examples of good active listening practices, demonstrate how they can affect the quality of their service, and so on - the sky is the limit. 

2. Encourage your staff to practice

Workshops are one thing, but applying what you learned is something completely different. You should ask your agents if they’re willing to practice their active listening skills in their day-to-day work.

For instance, you can instruct them to ask more open-ended questions and also to occasionally repeat back the phrase the customer said to ensure no miscommunication is happening. Before long, you’re likely to notice positive changes in your customer service center. 

3. Minimize any distractions

If your agents can’t focus, you should see to it their working space is quiet and distraction-free. Try to minimize the use of personal mobile devices during calls and instruct them to provide the caller with full attention. 

It’s also worthwhile to remind your agents to eliminate multitasking and ask them for their input. Maybe their workload is excessive and they have no other option but to multitask, or maybe they’re just distracted by social media on their phones. Regardless, all of the above will help your agents focus on the customer.

4. Reward active listening

Agents, like anyone else, are slaves to their habits and are likely to scoff at the changes you’re trying to implement. This is why you may need to acknowledge instances of improvements in listening skills.

Sure, you can use verbal praise, but we recommend offering rewards or bonuses to the agents who saw the most improvement.

Active listening for the win!

Active listening is the most important skill for a customer service rep. This is why you should insist on all your agents taking their time to amplify their skills on their own or help them learn during team training. 

Naturally, you may find that some people are ill-equipped to improve their communication skills. In that case, you may need to hire someone who already has the traits that will set them up for success in customer service.

By insisting on active listening, you’ll eventually reap all the benefits of providing a better customer service experience.