The Fine Art of Listening (and Asking Questions) - Transmission Digest

The Fine Art of Listening (and Asking Questions)

Why is it so hard to get people who are supposed to be taking in facts, sorting them out, and returning useful information, to listen? There are any number of reasons ranging from lack of proper training to thinking they know more about the issue than the person explaining it to them, to bad attitude, to burnout, to over inflated ego, to daydreaming, to pretending to understand when they really don’t. You name it and you’ll probably be right.

The Fine Art of Listening (and Asking Questions)

It's Your Business

Author: Terry Greenhut
Subject Matter: Shop management
Issue: Listening
The Fine Art of Listening (and Asking Questions)

It's Your Business

Author: Terry Greenhut
Subject Matter: Shop management
Issue: Listening

It’s Your Business

  • Author: Terry Greenhut
  • Subject Matter: Shop management
  • Issue: Listening

15th in a series

Listening and hearing are two very different functions, although they are easily confused and often substituted for one another. Businesses, in general, could be far more successful if people at all levels practiced active listening.

Why is it so hard to get people who are supposed to be taking in facts, sorting them out, and returning useful information, to listen? There are any number of reasons ranging from lack of proper training to thinking they know more about the issue than the person explaining it to them, to bad attitude, to burnout, to over inflated ego, to daydreaming, to pretending to understand when they really don’t. You name it and you’ll probably be right.

As Grandma always said, “The fish stinks from the head back.” If the leadership and training aren’t any good the employee doesn’t have a fighting chance of doing the job properly. Take the case of telephone tech support offered by cell-phone providers, computer and printer manufacturers, and of course, everyone’s favorite ¬– cable TV companies.

Not listening

I recently watched a documentary on how these customer-service people are hired and trained overseas to try to provide support for customers in the United States and Canada. Even though these candidates speak and understand some form of English, it isn’t same form as Americans or Canadians. The company chooses a group to train based on them sounding as close to North American as they can find. In their training program the first thing they teach the new recruits is American and Canadian jargon, words and phrases to make them sound as though they’ve lived their entire lives here. The trainers work on smoothing out their accents, but they can’t take forever doing it so the group gets thinned out some more. When they finally arrive at a collection of people they feel might be able to handle the job, they begin to teach. They don’t teach these so-called technicians how to fix anything. They teach them how to read choices off a list of what could be wrong and how to remedy it. If the caller’s problem doesn’t fit the parameters, they can’t help, so they put the customer on hold while they make a call to the next higher level of internal support. At that level the support people have been fed more information but not always enough to resolve the issue, so they have to call the next level. There might be four or five levels before a real technician is reached who can actually figure it out.

Take note that many of these companies won’t transfer you to these higher levels. They make you wait for your initial service person to report back to you each time resulting in you spending sometimes hours of your precious time waiting on hold and trying out every fix they come up with. More often than not because they are reading off a screen, the solution they give you doesn’t match your problem because they aren’t really listening to you. They hear part of what you tell them, then try to match it up with a fix. They apparently aren’t taught to hear out the entire problem.

Just send me a modem

Case in point: Several weeks ago hurricane Irma passed through Florida knocking out power in its wake. When power was restored, five days later, I kept losing my internet service, which I have with FIOS. It would be OK for about 12 hours then disappear. If I unplugged the modem and rebooted it, I was good for about another 12 hours. I don’t know which one I dread calling more, FIOS, the manufacturer of my cell phone or my cellular carrier, but I will try almost anything myself not to have to make those calls. In this case I had no choice. I had already done everything I knew how to no avail.

The woman at FIOS tech support was barely understandable and of course kept putting me on hold every time she wanted to try something different while she checked it out with the higher ups. We kept rebooting cable boxes and modems for hours. Finally I said, “This is ridiculous; you keep having me do the same things over and over with no change in outcome. Send out a technician.” She was reluctant to make the appointment because she said it might take over a week due to the backlog after Irma. “Then send me a new modem. This one is probably fried.” After putting me on hold for another 10 minutes while she got the approval, she agreed to replace the modem but said she couldn’t overnight it as had been their practice in the past, unless I was suffering from one of the diseases that was on another one of her lists. By this time I was fried. “Just send it. I don’t care anymore,” I said. When it finally arrived five days later, I plugged it in, set it up on the network and – miracle of miracles – it worked. Just another example of brilliant customer service.

What does it all mean? You can’t provide good customer service if you don’t have the right attitude toward solving your customer’s problems. You also can’t do it if you hire people that your customers can’t easily understand or who don’t listen because they’re much more interested in reading answers from a cheat sheet. Your customer service people have to understand the product at least to a degree where they can provide help without having to put callers on hold for an eternity and they need to be given the authority to spend up to a prescribed amount to solve a problem without having to get approval. If they can fit those parameters, they have a much better chance of providing the service that customers deserve.

Keep asking questions

How well do you listen when a new customer calls or comes in and describes a problem with their vehicle? If you are a technician yourself you are no doubt trying to figure out a solution as the words are coming out of the customer’s mouth; that’s automatic. You might also cut the customer off if the explanation gets too long or if you think you already know the answer. If I just described you then you need to start practicing restraint, holding back your ego and answer until they finish. Your ego, of course, is that switch in your mind that makes you want to show others how smart you are. It makes you talk when you should be listening and can often get you in a considerable amount of trouble.

Take for example the caller who begins to describe a transmission problem and you decide from the little bit of information you’ve been given that you know what they need. If the next question is, “How much will it cost?” you are much more likely to blurt out a price of some kind than if you had no clue at all what was wrong.

I used to ask transmission people at my seminars, “Do you know how much you need to get for a THM350?” Most of them would say, “Sure I do.” Then I would ask, “How about a Mercedes?” Then they would say, “No, I would need to take that one apart to see what parts were damaged before I could give a price.” In other words, if you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell. Making an assumption that you know without being able to have a look is very costly. By blurting out a price you are locking yourself into a number that could easily lose you money or scare the customer away completely.

The right way to handle the situation is to hear out customers completely and then make them understand that the only way to get a real price is to bring the vehicle in for a thorough checkout. This is accomplished by asking more questions and allowing their answers to lead you into the next appropriate questions until such time as you feel you should close for an appointment.

If, for example, the caller is describing a problem, and based on what you’re hearing them say, you decide to ask, “How long has it been doing that?” You will get one of two answers. “It just started or it’s been doing it for a while now.” Either answer takes you where you want to be if you are listening. If they say it just started, you know you have a person who is really concerned and most likely wants it looked at as soon as possible. Your next move, once you hear that, is to immediately offer the appointment. You might say, “It’s good that you called right away. Getting the problem checked out early might save you some money. Can you bring it in now or would 2 o’clock be better for you?” If on the other hand they say that it’s been going on for quite a while, you need to find out why they chose now to call. Say, “I understand, but if it has been this way for a while, did something happen that made you decide to call now?” Once again listen because their answer will lead you directly to getting the appointment. They might say, “It got a lot worse today” or “I didn’t have the money to get it fixed till now.” Either way they are indicating that now is the time they want to have something done about it. Whatever you do, don’t stall them off. Offer the earliest possible appointment because they are ready right now. You don’t want them to have a chance to change their minds or call another shop if you can’t accommodate them immediately.

There are many instances in business where the customer will give you all the information you need to either close a sale or help with a problem. All you have to do is ask the appropriate questions and listen carefully to the answers. Don’t rush to judgment. Take enough time to give your answer the thought process it needs. If you don’t yet have enough information, keep asking questions and analyzing answers until you do.

Keep in mind that some of the smartest people you will ever meet listen far more than they talk.

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