Guide to building effective call center scripts

By allowing your call center agents to be the ones who talk to your customers, you put your business’ reputation in their hands. If you empower them – for example, by giving them powerful call center scripts – they will be able to provide excellent customer experience for your customers and increase your sales performance by closing more deals.  

Before we go deeper into the topic, let’s quickly define what call center scripts are. Call center scripts are written scripts that call center agents refer to and read from when on the phone with a customer. Admins typically use drag-and-drop call center script editors trying to give agents all the information and tools they need. When used properly, they can help your agents provide a seamless customer experience. On the other hand, a lack of effective call center scripts can easily turn your customer service into a nightmare or reduce the levels of your sales performance.

As such, building effective call center scripts is essential to the successful operation of any call center. And by using them, you can definitely improve your call center efficiency.

In this article, we’ve gathered a few tips on building effective call center scripts. 

1. Assess and understand your customers’ needs

First of all, let’s be clear: knowing your customers’ expectations is your best chance of creating effective call center scripts. Avoid working with outdated scripts, and allocate enough time to creating customized call center scripts that perfectly cover your customers’ current expectations.

To do that, you’ll need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When you start building a call center script, try and collect all the relevant information that your agents may need during any phone call with your customers.

For example, if you’re building a script for agents handling inbound calls, start by asking yourself the following questions: Why are my agents receiving these calls? What answers do our customers expect from us? How will they react to problematic issues? What solutions will they expect us to offer them in the case of any problems? An effective script has to answer all these questions, so before starting to work on any script, you really have to be able to see the whole picture from the point of view of both your agents and your customers.

Keep in mind that call centers usually record their calls for training purposes. So why not check previous calls for script-building hints? By listening to previous calls, you can collect valuable information on common issues, and start to improve your scripts.

2. Utilize call center technology

In an era of technological advances, it’s essential to leverage top-quality technology solutions. Not so long ago, agents simply printed out their scripts, and either memorized them or read them from their hard copy. Fortunately, these days, you can easily integrate call center scripts within call center software.

Our call center software, for example, allows you to build and customize your scripts using an intuitive drag-and-drop editing interface.

A reliable call center scripting software will allow your agents to follow the text at the same time as being on the phone and working on the project. Thus, instead of using several platforms, your agents only need to work in one system, reducing the chances of them becoming confused during a phone call.

With the help of a good solution, your agents will even be able to enjoy using call center scripts. In particular, adding colors and pictures to scripts is always helpful in terms of highlighting important commands, and doing this definitely keeps agents focused on the topic.

Check out our scripting tool in action:

3. Make it simple, informative, and customer-focused

Call center scripts are often long, and have far too many branches. While it’s important to include all necessary information and possible answers in a script, it’s better to keep things simple for the sake of remaining customer-friendly.

Also, the shorter a script, the lower the average call duration. Just one aspect that helps you boost your efficiency. For more details, check out our pro tips on how to measure call center efficiency.

So, include only the necessary information in your call center script, and keep it short and simple. It’s also important not to turn it into a sales brochure, especially if it’s an inbound script.

Of course, if you use call center scripts for telesales activities, your main goal is to sell your product or service. However, you still have to keep things balanced, as simply reading out sales material will make your agents sound like robots.

4. Keep it natural

When building a call center script, you need to make it sound as natural as possible. By doing this, your customers will not feel that the phone call is being guided by predefined points.

So don’t forget, although call center scripts are in written form, they always need to reflect spoken language. Try to build a conversational-style script, and avoid making it too formal. We’re not (yet) in the age of robots, so don’t make your customers feel like they’re listening to a machine.

Furthermore, flexibility is also a way of keeping your call center scripts natural. It’s important to provide proper guidance to your agents so that they can represent your business in the appropriate way. However, unexpected situations will always occur, and your agents may have to redirect a conversation or give spontaneous answers to your customers. So, give your agents some space to improvise if they have to, as it will probably help them create a more natural and friendlier customer conversation.  

5. Don’t skip call center script rehearsals

Once you have built your call center script by following the steps above, it’s time to test it. Rule number one: never skip call center script rehearsals.

You may think you have the perfect call center script, but how do you know it works, if you haven’t tested it yet? (I assume you don’t want to test it on your customers…). Time to start rehearsing call center scripts together with your agents. By doing this, they receive additional training, while you can detect mistakes in the script. It’s a win-win situation.

6. Never stop analyzing and optimizing for better results

Once your agents start to use your call center script, it’s essential that you continue to keep an eye on them. Look at the data that has been collected to see if the script is effective enough. Analyzing performance metrics, such as call duration, will also help you measure the effectiveness of the script. And don’t forget to gather feedback from your agents: as it is they who are directly on the phone to your customers, they will also be able to share valuable information with you.

Using call center scripts can have a powerful effect on your business – but only if the script you use is powerful itself. One thing is for sure: if you get it right, it definitely works. So, what are you waiting for? Think about the steps mentioned above, and start to build effective scripts for your call center. Good luck!