Do You Know Your Customer And Agent Communication Styles?

What Are Persona Communication Styles?

Both customers and employees use one of four Persona Communication Styles (i.e., supporter, influencer, analyzer & driver) as their primary communication style when interacting with others. Identifying customer and employee communication styles and applying adaptability style strategies helps agents determine the best way to interact with all customer persona communication styles successfully. Contact centers and agents who provide great CX (e.g., high FCR, call resolution, and NPS ratings) have high adaptive style ratings for handling different customer Persona Communication Styles. An agent needs to identify the persona of a customer they are interacting with quickly and adapt to their Persona Communication Style to deliver great CX and for improving customer satisfaction (Csat).

SQM’s Unique Approach to Persona Communication Styles

While there are a lot of ways that organizations measure communication styles, at SQM, we realize the value of letting the customer be the judge for determining their communication style. SQM’s Persona Communication Styles is unique because it uses the voice of the customer. After all, it is the customer’s view that matters most for assessing and improving CX. SQM conducted comprehensive research to determine persona communication styles. Furthermore, our research identifies the agent behaviors and word choices that an agent can use to adapt to a customer’s persona and ultimately provide a great customer experience.

Interested in Persona Communication Styles? REQUEST DEMO of our software and discover new ways to connect with clients based on their communication style. 

Overview of the 4 Communication Styles

Persona Communication Styles Distribution

Our research shows that each persona has a significant percentage distribution, which suggests that for an agent to provide great customer experience and improve customer satisfaction (Csat), they need to understand each persona. By identifying the customer Persona Communication Style quickly, an agent can potentially avoid the behaviors that can create poor customer experiences by using behaviors and word choices that match the customer's Persona Communication Style.

Agent Adaptability Score

To determine agent adaptability capabilities, we asked the customer how strongly they agreed that the agent’s communication style was a good fit for them. To assess agent adaptability capabilities, SQM uses an Agent Adaptability Score. This score is based on the percentage of customers who rated them top box response (i.e., Strongly Agree).

It is important to note that agents with high adaptability scores have the same customer satisfaction ratings across all customer Persona Communication Styles. Low Agent Adaptability Scores represent a great opportunity for most contact centers to focus on improving their agent’s ability to quickly identify the customer’s Persona Communication Style within the first minute of the call and train them on how to adapt their communication style to match the customer's Persona Communication Style.

Improving Agent Adaptability Scores with mySQM™ Customer Service QA Software

While there are a lot of ways that organizations measure communication styles, at SQM, we believe the best practice for identifying Persona Communication Styles is to let the customer be the judge. What makes SQM’s Persona Communication Styles approach unique is that it is based on the voice of the customer using mySQM™ Customer Service QA software for identifying personas and our software’s Soft Skills e-Learning Personalized Intelligence™ feature for training agents how to adapt their communication style to match the customers they are talking to.