Recovering when call plan fails

W07

Recovering when call plan fails

D1 — Directive

Primary: Q2 — Discover/Negotiate: Establish Ground for ActionQ3 — Delivery of ActionCompany not customer

This session creates the space for your coachee to see how they can connect more effectively with their customers. Your role is to help them observe what is happening — not to tell them what to change.

1. Diagnosis

Agent cannot recover when their call plan fails. Agent gets stuck in a negative cycle and cannot recover or gracefully exit the call to come back later.

2. Behaviour Observations

What you might see or hear that points to this pattern.

Agent is making an outbound call.
The customer's mood is angry or negative through to the end of the call.
The agent is repeating themselves but the customer is not listening.
The customer is making requests or comments that the agent is not responding to.

3. Session Objective

Where an agent is making an outbound call with an offer they have prepared to make to the customer or a proposal to close a customer issue, they can get stuck if the call does not go according to plan.

4. Session Tactics

How to prepare for and structure the 45-minute call review.

Bring the call planning sheet to the session. Go through the process: 1) Flat request — What customer says they want 2) Concern — What is going on in the customer's world 3) Our proposal — What we propose to do for the customer 4) If our proposal differs from what the customer asked for, state why we are taking a different approach 5) Why what we are doing helps customers 6) What will happen next.

5. GROW Experiments

Experiments the coachee might choose to try. These are offers, not prescriptions — the coachee selects what feels right for them.

Experiment 1

When the customer is interrupting while the agent is going through their prepared offer, the agent should ask for permission to 1) complete their offer so that 2) they can then listen to what the customer is saying.

Experiment 2

Recognising the call has gone wrong (middle of call): if the customer is rejecting the offer for unanticipated reasons, stop pushing, listen to the new objection and promise a callback in a short timeperiod.

Experiment 3

Recognising the call has gone wrong (end of call): if the customer is still very unhappy, spend time talking about the steps the company will take and that the customer can take to help with their issue.

Behaviour Tags

Cannot recover when plan fails