Both are difficult, and now there are certainly issues of
personal safety that come into play in face to face in customer service
interactions, but in my experience designing and conducting customer service
training for a broad range of businesses is that phone interactions are more
difficult.
First, the customer may have been frustrated or angered for
a longer length of time before they get on the call, often escalating their
emotional state.
They may have had to wait or be transferred before getting
on the call with the right rep so again their negative emotions can escalate.
There is an entire body of research on hold time and transferred calls' effect
on customer service.
They may feel safer and shielded by physical distance
anonymity, they are not right there in front of you, so even a little old lady
customer who never yells or cusses in public could become a ranting maniac.
You don’t have all their body language cues to read so you
can understand them and help them and relate to them personally more easily on
a human level. You can exchange up to 10,000 cues with one person in a
face-to-face interaction and you miss out on that rich information on the
phone. It can be harder for you to relate to them if you are just going from a
bad complaining customer to a bad complaining customer.
In addition, they
can’t see all your nonverbal cues and may react to you as a nebulous faceless
“other” the company that, “Did them wrong” the enemy instead of a living
breathing real human being.
You also don’t have access to many “de-escalating”
techniques, such as nonverbal listening cues, like head tilts and head nods,
look/look away constant eye contact, open body windows (like open heart, open
palms, relaxing posture moves, side by side engagement, the list goes on and
one. On the phone, you can do vocal matching and mirroring, which is very
powerful, but you have to learn all the intricacies of matching and mirroring
so it is authentic.
