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“The average business spends 17 and a half hours a week clarifying misheard conversations. This failure to really be good listeners carries over and literally costs money. That's time that could have been spent outbounding. It could have been spent invoicing, collecting payments, or sending statements.” — Tim McGuire, Senior Program Manager at ServiceTitan
Service professionals, from field technicians and CSRs to sales reps and dispatchers, routinely listen to customer needs and concerns, often while a customer is experiencing a difficult situation.
When a service provider fails to effectively listen, the customer can feel disregarded or undervalued, leading to a breakdown in trust. The service provider may also miss important details or specific needs, resulting in inadequate solutions that fail to address the customer's core concerns.
In a 2023 Pantheon session titled Hearing Is Not Enough – Overcome Objections and Take Control by Listening, Tim McGuire, Senior Program Manager at ServiceTitan, and Michelle Hague, Senior Manager of Digital Content at ServiceTitan, provide strategies for effectively listening to customer concerns and overcoming objections.
McGuire and Hague emphasize the need to truly listen and understand the customer's needs and objections, rather than just waiting to respond. They introduce the topic of active listening, a communication technique that requires the listener to fully concentrate, understand, respond, and remember what is being said. It involves giving the speaker verbal and nonverbal feedback to demonstrate understanding and promote a mutual understanding of the conversation.
“Active listening skills are a tool we can use upfront to make sure we don't put ourselves in difficult situations, and ideally have a better relationship with our customer,” McGuire says.
As businesses strive to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive landscape, understanding the crucial role of active listening in fostering trust, satisfaction, and long-term customer relationships becomes paramount.
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LEAP Framework for Active Listening
McGuire and Hague kicked off the session by introducing a framework for effective listening known as LEAP, an acronym that stands for Listen, Empathize, Ask, and Produce.
“We hope you can use LEAP to become a better listener in your day-to-day interactions with your customers, and with your friends and family as well,” Hague says.
Listen
When it comes to listening to customer concerns, McGuire says people tend to hear what they want to hear, but not necessarily hear what's actually being said. It often causes the listener to misconstrue the root cause of the issue, which can cause the customer to feel like their needs are not being met.
“We want you to listen to understand, and take out that immediate need to respond,” McGuire says.
Emphasize
McGuire says contractors frequently encounter customers who are experiencing an incredibly stressful moment in their lives, such as a broken air conditioner in the middle of a heat wave.
“They're at a complete and utter disadvantage compared to us,” McGuire says. “Something’s broken that they don't understand how to fix, and they've got this fear of ‘What’s it going to cost me to make myself whole again?’”
The key is to learn how to emphasize with the customer, put yourself in their shoes, and consider how they feel.
Ask
McGuire says asking questions can help you emphasize with the customer, and if they have an objection to your solution, it makes it easier to understand the root of their objection. He says the “asking” component also involves asking permission to offer a solution.
“That asking piece lets us start to really engage,” McGuire says. “We're not just hearing each other, we're not just listening to each other, but we're actually trying to engage in finding a solution.”
Produce
“Finally, we have to produce,” McGuire says. “You can be the greatest listener, but if you're not taking things to that next step of actually delivering on what you've promised, then you've really missed the boat.”
Pitfalls of Ineffective Listening
McGuire warns that when listening and empathizing with a customer, you can easily fall into the trap of automatically thinking how you’d respond to the questions or act in the situation, which is known in psychology as fundamental attribution error. He says it often leads to an us-versus-them scenario.
“This is really tough when we talk about working in the contracting world, because this us-versus-them is even more pronounced,” he says. “The customer feels vulnerable as you walk into the home. Their guard is up. They’re thinking, ‘This guy's going to rip me off. He's going to try to get everything out of me that he can.’”
McGuire says it’s normal for people to identify how they’d act in certain situations, but when we're confronted with other people, we tend not to really consider what's causing them to act that way.
“This is where stepping back and actually figuring out the right questions to ask and putting yourself in the position of that other party to the conversation becomes really important,” he says. “We've been trained our entire lives to believe that we're the most important part of conversations. It just happens. It doesn't make us bad folks.”
To complicate matters further, McGuire says most people only retain about 25% of a conversation, meaning we’re not only not listening the right way, but we’re also missing out on a majority of the conversation.
“The average business spends 17 and a half hours a week clarifying misheard conversations,” McGuire says. “This failure to really be good listeners carries over and literally costs money. That's time that could have been spent outbounding. It could have been spent invoicing, collecting payments, or sending statements.”
Putting Active Listening into Practice
To demonstrate active listening and overcoming customer objections, McGuire and Hague led the audience through a role-playing exercise. McGuire plays an HVAC contractor and Hague plays a homeowner whose air conditioning abruptly stops working on a Friday afternoon.
McGuire: So, Michelle, we evaluated your system, and we see there's actually a leak. We can do a leak repair. But honestly, it's a 20-year-old air conditioning system, and the money you're going to spend to actually repair it at this point is going to be much more inefficient than it would be to replace the system. If you're interested in replacement, I can have folks here Monday morning, and we can start getting you comfortable in your home.
Hague: Yeah, but today's Friday. I'm really going to just have to call somebody else.
McGuire: You want to reach out to someone else? Do you feel the price that I'm giving you for that replacement is fair?
Hague: The price looks good, and I think we can handle it, but I'm just going to have to call somebody else. This isn’t going to work.
McGuire: Are you wondering if it's the right equipment for you? Do you think maybe we're trying to sell you a system that's a little bit beyond what you need?
Hague: I don't know too much about the system, so I definitely would trust your judgment. But it's Friday and I need something a little bit quicker than Monday.
McGuire: Michelle, would you mind if I ask you a question?
Hague: Sure.
McGuire: I feel like there's something you're not telling me that might be important to this conversation. I'm happy to leave you a quote. You can reach out to someone else, but I really feel like we could do business together.
Hague: To be perfectly honest, I'm newly married, my mother-in-law's coming to town for the first time and coming to our brand new house. I really need to make a good impression and having her stay at my house with no air conditioning when it's 95 degrees outside, it's just not going to cut it. I need to find somebody to come in here a little bit quicker.
McGuire: I don't have a crew until Monday to do this and I wouldn't normally do a fix-it repair like this if we're going to do an install, but I can recharge the system right now. We'll do that at a reduced price and if you'll agree to sign the contract, we'll come back on Monday and do the install. We'll get you up and running so that we can get your home comfortable, the visit with your mother-in-law goes well, and then we can get you comfortable starting on Monday with your new efficient system. How does that sound?
Hague: Yeah, if it would get us through the weekend, I definitely could spend the time Monday. Will that work?
McGuire: Yeah.
Hague: Awesome!
McGuire: Let’s do it. We take credit cards right here, and I'm offering integrated financing options at 0% down.
“You see the difference?” McGuire asks the audience. “If I had simply accepted the ‘I want to get another quote,’ I’d be thinking to myself, ‘Oh, they don't trust me. They're price shoppers.’ In reality, it wasn't the price. It was the timing that we had to get to the bottom of in that case.
McGuire and Hague explained how the HVAC contractor thought the most logical solution was to replace the entire system, but made the mistake of not assessing the situation from the customer’s point of view. She needed an immediate solution, and the failure of the contractor to not listen to her concerns almost cost him the job.
“I asked Michelle, ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question, and do you mind if I offer you a different solution here? Can you share why you're feeling that way?’” McGuire says. “Asking permission is really powerful in the trades because we’re generally encountering people at their absolute most vulnerable moment.
“We’re asking permission to offer a different take, not to step over them, but to say, ‘Look, I'd like to offer a different perspective. Would you mind if I shared it with you?’ It all helps to bring you a little bit closer to communicating with each other instead of talking at each other,” McGuire adds.
