Asking the right questions and knowing which ones are the best fit for the occasion is crucial for call center agents in sales and service. Careful listening, funneling the information to actionable decisions, and maintaining the natural flow of conversation, are vital skills to fully understanding a customer’s concerns and needs.
Probing questions hold a lot of value in closing both inbound and outbound sales. However, the one size fits all formula does not apply to all businesses or customers. For instance, questions that work for a business IT solutions company may not be even relevant to a retail company. A more practical and fruitful approach would be to create personalized questions with a focus on extraction that holds value for your business. For a contact center, probing questions are carefully curated by customer experts to get the responses naturally resulting in maximum information. If probing questions are not provided by management, look to the top performers and experiment to find which questions yield the best results.
Qualities of Effective Probing Questions
A crucial quality of effective probing questions is to work them naturally into the conversation while building a personal rapport with the customer. Robotic and generic questions are not optimum for creating engagement in any channel of a multi or omnichannel call center.
There are 2 types of questions: open-ended & closed-ended. The open-ended questions are probing and aimed at getting the most info whereas closed-ended questions help direct communication in a specified direction, with a more yes and no kind of straightforward confirmations. The timing of asking these questions also has a significant impact on the effectiveness of the whole communication.
The following are other qualities your probing questions should have:
- Your questions should be relatable for the prospects.
- The tone of the questions must be friendly and display a willingness to help.
- Language should be easy to comprehend without unexplained use of industry jargon.
- There should be a direct or subtle connection of questions with your services/products.
- There needs to be a logical succession of questions.
Benefits of Probing Questions
More than asking these questions, businesses benefit from the subsequent information the customers and prospects share. Therefore, it is in the best interest of the companies to hold brainstorming sessions with sales trends, marketing, and product teams to work side-by-side and create the best probing questions. Also, it is advisable to test those questions in mock calls. This way, companies can better empathize with the customers and present and design the best suited probing questions.
Regardless of the industry and nature of products, such questions can be of significant help. For example, if your company deals in workforce management software, a customer will make an informed decision after a natural and effective conversation. You also have better chances to cross-sell or upsell your product and services. Questions should be geared to assisting the customer in identifying the features and benefits they are looking for and ultimately steering them to the best product to fill those needs.
Examples of Probing Questions
Creating your own probing questions is generally the best practice. Still, some common ones apply across industries. Those questions can give you a good overall concept of what questions to incorporate.
At times, the purpose of asking questions is also to confirm the information you get from customers. For that, there are two approaches. You can either repeat the information or ask confirmation questions. This input can help you offer the best solutions, and your customer engagement model will walk away satisfied.
The following sample probing questions can help your team develop the types of questions best suited to your products and services:
- Can you share more information about the issue?
- How is this impacting you or your business?
- For how long have you been facing this issue?
- Have you had a similar issue in the past?
- What course of action did you take in the past for its resolution?
- What steps have you taken so far for the resolution of this issue?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how severe do you think it is?
B2B Sales
- Is this challenge common in your industry?
- Are your competitors facing the same issue?
- Is the issue affecting a few or all users?
- If your competitor were in the same situation, how would you leverage the situation?
- How bad can it get if not taken care of sooner?
- Why doesn’t your current solution address the issue? Do you think it should?
- How invested are you in overcoming this issue?
- Which departments are affected the most by the issue?
- What would be an ideal timeframe for its solution?
- What budget range are you willing to allocate towards its solution?
- What’s an ideal situation you would propose to someone going through the same issue?
- What measures are you hesitant to take?
- What measures are you willing to take?
- We are not missing any important info, are we?
Conclusion
The inclusion of probing questions makes communication more effective and gives a personalized and human touch. Regardless of the channel, these questions help enhance the quality of interaction, and improve customer experience which has a tangible impact on your sales. In fact, according to a PWC survey, for 73% of people in the US, customer experience is what impacts their buying decision. So, including these questions in the training of your agents should be a priority to have an edge over the competition.