5 Tips for Being a Culturally Sensitive Call Center Agent

Working as a call center agent means interacting with a wide variety of people. On any given day, you’ll deal with people who have different expectations, emotional states and manners of communicating. This is par for the course of being a call center agent. You knew that you were signing up for that when you took the job.

You may not have realized that there would be even more complex dissimilarities between your callers, including culture, language, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age and ability.

Excellent customer service is about giving callers the best experience you can by being sensitive to their needs. With the sheer diversity of the callers you may deal with on any given day, this may seem daunting.

Here are five simple tips for being a more culturally sensitive call center agent:

1. Listen

Active listening is the number one rule of being a call center agent in general and it’s also your best tool for being culturally sensitive. Callers are speaking with you because they are seeking help. They would like for you to understand their needs and help them as quickly as possible.

Sometimes what they need is empathy, as well as customer service. Take note of how they are explaining their problem. If their problem is beyond your understanding, do your best to be empathetic.

Ex: A customer who uses a wheelchair is calling to complain that her package was delivered to the end of her driveway.

In addition, pay attention to how customers refer to themselves. This can help in a case where you are unsure of what pronoun to use when addressing the caller.

2. Ask for clarification

Always ask customers clarifying questions to determine if you are providing them with adequate care. Doing so shows that you are interested in what they are saying and conveys respect.

This is particularly useful for callers who describe situations that you may not be familiar with.

Ex: A customer calls to say that he was inconvenienced that his package was delivered on Saturday while it was raining because he couldn’t bring it into the house since it was Shabbat.

Asking for clarification is also particularly useful for people who speak with heavy accents. Don’t risk getting the wrong information!

Note: Be careful about the number and type of questions you ask. Asking too many clarifying questions may be alienating for customers.

3. Exercise patience

Everyone gets frustrated listening to someone who isn’t explaining themselves clearly or who is highly emotional. Remember: Being patient with callers is an essential part of being a call center agent. You can’t foster customer loyalty if your customers think you’re annoyed listening to them. They called in so that you would listen!

This situation often arises when there is a large age difference between the agent and the caller. Keep in mind that older generations did not grow up with the same technology as you did.

Ex: An elderly woman with minimal technical skills calls in seeking technical support for her cable television.

4. Show Respect

No matter who the caller is, they deserve to be treated with respect. They may not come from the same background that you do, but it’s not your business to judge them for it. You have been hired to provide excellent customer service, regardless of who the customer is.

Sometimes callers are on the line for extended periods of time and you may want to make small talk. Avoid controversial subjects such as politics, religion and social issues.

Ex: If a customer begins speaking about a political topic on which you have a differing point of view, guide the conversation to a more benign subject.

5. Suggest an alternate resolution style

There may be some cases in which you are simply not able to help the caller. This could be related to a language barrier or a cultural misunderstanding. It’s also possible that you were inadvertently insensitive at some point and the caller no longer wishes to speak with you.

Do not take any of these things to heart. Interpersonal relations are often complex. The important thing is that the customer receives the help that s/he called in for. Refer the caller to another support channel or to a better qualified agent in your organization.

The job of a call center agent is not always easy, but these tips may be able to relieve some of the stress involved with interacting with diverse callers.

Many of these scenarios can be improved by using better call center technology with robust functionality and a wide variety of call center software features. Talkdesk’s cloud-based call center software allows for call disposition codes and notes, comprehensive customer information and skills-based routing. All of these features ensure that callers are sent to the right agents and those agents are equipped with the right information to provide excellent customer service.