Sometimes it's not enough to simply solve the customer's problem. Sometimes you've got to throw in a hug... metaphorically thinking.

That's the lesson leaders of a major call center learned when they analyzed metrics measuring the effectiveness of its sales team. It's also the reason the call center turned to whole brain thinking to improve overall customer satisfaction.

This specific call center served as the problem-solving clearing house for the largest telecom company in the country, and every day, tens of thousands of calls poured in from callers reporting problems with their internet, data, voice, mobile, and land-lines. They couldn't connect to the internet. It took too long to connect to the internet. The internet was too slow. They were burning through their data plans too fast.

Everyone who called needed help – and help is exactly what they got.

According to the data, the call center's staff was extremely effective and efficient at solving their customers' technical problems. Performance goals were being met. Customers' technological problems were being solved. The entire process was working just the way the company's leadership drew it up.

But a significant percentage of customers kept calling back.

These call-backs became a big concern for the call center for three big reasons:

1. They took up a lot of employee time to deal with problems that were supposed to have been fixed already.
2. They didn't make it easy for call center employees to offer upgrades or additional services or generate new leads.
3. They indicated that the customers' problems were not being properly or fully addressed during the initial call.
   
   

In the case of this particular call center, the follow-up calls actually had nothing to do with the technical problems not being solved. Instead, they had everything to do with the customers' feelings. The data showed that most of the people who called back were pleased with the way their technological problems were solved, but they didn't feel as if their emotional needs were being met.

Turns out the customers didn't just have problems; they also had feelings, and they were negatively impacting the center's customer satisfaction scores. Sure, the callers wanted faster internet service, but they also wanted someone to empathize with them. They wanted someone to listen. They wanted some to fix their technological problems and understand why the problem was so important to them.

They wanted a metaphorical hug.

Enter Whole Brain Thinking

The call center's leaders quickly realized that there was a gap in its training. It wasn't enough to only have the sales team follow a killer script, to run through thorough checklists and solve the technical problems. The sales team needed training that went beyond the products and services the company offered. They needed training that armed them with the ability to identify customers' deeper root-issue needs – and equipped the sales team to address them.

They needed training in the art and science of whole brain thinking.

Once every employee who worked in that call center received training on whole brain thinking, they learned to understand how to process information in the different ways that others processed information and how to use that understanding to then build connections with the people on the other end of the phone line. The training intensively taught the call center employees to learn to recognize their customers' thinking preferences over the phone by analyzing language usage and sentence structure... and it worked.

Today these employees are still solving their customers' technical problems at impressive rates, but they are also having meaningful conversations with customers – which is leading to conversions and increased satisfaction.