A customer with a repeated poor service experience rarely sticks around to keep doing business.
They’re a danger to your business since you won’t only lose word-of-mouth advertising, they can also ruin your reputation with just a word.
While many factors affect good customer service, communication is one of the essential aspects you need.
One misstep could easily result in miscommunication between you and your customers so there must always be caution when talking to them.
As a customer service representative, you’d know that it’s challenging to communicate with certain people.
It’s a challenge to become an effective communicator with these types of people.
To be an effective communicator, you must learn not to assume not everyone communicates and process information the same way you do.
This is why tools such as DISC Profiling is vital for customer service.
The DISC profile gives a detailed report on your observable personality and behaviour.
It’s a tool that can be used to understand one’s personality trait better to improve their skills in handling conflict.
Customer service representatives could use DISC profiling to train for teamwork, problem-solving, and response to customers.
DISC is an acronym for the four primary personality traits: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance.
Each has specific behaviour styles that have to face significant challenges regarding interaction with people which they can overcome with proper training.
If you want to improve your customer service through DISC profiling, you must first determine your behavioural style and the behavioural style of your customer.
Dominance Style
Representatives with a high “D” behavioural style tend to not beat around the bush. They’re very direct and straight to the point. While they listen to a customer’s complaint and could quickly offer a solution, they’re not focused on finding the cause.
Influence Style
As the name suggests, people included in influence are great influencers. Their ability to influence their point of view and their manner of thinking makes them a good salesperson. They tend to offer explanations and assurances, without knowing if it’s possible to fulfil.
High “I” representatives are naturals at communicating, but they’re holistic thinkers, unintentionally forgetting the details of a customers’ problem, who probably won’t be able to get in a word. On the other hand, they’re usually the ones with a great sense of humour and can lighten people up.
Steadiness Style
People categorised in the S styles are the people who really care about their customers. They’re the ones who pride in the role of being able to help other people. They can make customers feel comfortable to vent their frustrations.
On the other hand, they’re not able to handle confrontation. They tend to go to great lengths to avoid conflict and sugar-coat their words instead of being direct.
Compliant Style
Compliant customer service representatives are evaluators. They need to understand everything about everything. Sometimes they tend not to be the team player they have to be because they believe that everything has to be done a certain way. They’re very analytical, so when dealing with a complaining customer, they may ask detailed questions to ensure that they got all the facts.
Whatever style you have can often work against you. For example, High Dominant (D) reps tend to not get along with a Supportive (S) customer who manages to get offended by their lack of people skills. D reps handling S customers need to pry them to speak out with their problem, or their customer would hold it in.
Meanwhile, Influent (I) reps usually clash with Compliant (C) customers since they’re nitpicky and these types of reps wouldn’t understand why their problems are essential for them. Ignoring their problems would create a problem with the relationship.
DISC profile helps you become more self-knowledgeable and create a self-awareness to avoid encounters where you’ll naturally say the wrong thing. With this, your style wouldn’t be able to lead you in the wrong direction.