CHAPTER 48

Want to Help Your Customers? Shut Up

There are two words of advice that all good customer service reps and salespeople know: shut up. Learning to be quiet when a customer is talking is one of the many areas where customer service and sales are remarkably similar. When confronted with a prospect or a customer who has an issue, the initial reaction of most service reps is to start talking, offering assistance, and attempting to avoid the discomfort of silence. Salespeople do it too, throwing out everything they know about a product and hoping a shotgun approach will work. Both the customer service rep and the salesperson innately feel that if they’re talking, then they must be helping the customer. More often than not, they’re making ...

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