Cameron Herold advises business leaders to use intentionally positive language (replace negative words like "no" and "problem" with "absolutely," "my pleasure," etc.) and to train scripts across customer-facing teams. He recounts bringing sales trainer Jack Daly into the 1-800-GOT-JUNK call center, where Daly listened to recordings for hours, produced detailed notes (17 pages), and catalyzed a week-long improvement effort. Herold also recommends recording and transcribing calls (mentions Otter) so leaders can review agent conversations and give specific feedback.
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All right, so just thinking a little bit about some of the words that we use inside of our businesses and how often we are fairly subconscious about what we're saying. So I learned this one years ago from a mentor of mine, Jack Daly. We brought jack up to 1800 got junk. So this is going back 15 years, 16 years ago, when I was the chief operating officer at 1,800 got junk. We brought Jack Daly up, who's a specialist in sales, to work with us in our call center. And one of the 17 pages of notes that he took from his three hours of listening to our agents. That's a whole other story that I'll tell you in a second. But one of the notes from the 17 pages was that a lot of our agents, if not all of them, were saying no problem to customers. And he said both of those are negative words. No and problem are both negative words, and they throw off a negative connotation, negative response in the minds of our customers. And he said that we should actually be using more positive words like absolutely or happy to or my pleasure or, you know, of course. But any of those words that we are using day to day, we should be scripting out and training our customers, our. Sorry, not our customers, our customer service people, our salespeople, our leadership team, to use more positive words and more positive phrases. So a great suggestion would be to have somebody who specializes in nlp, neuro linguistic programming to take a look at your scripts, take a look at your sales letters, take a look at your marketing, maybe some of your website, but also to listen in on some of your phone calls of what you say with your customers, suppliers, prospects, etc. And re kind of word or rephrase some of what we say. So just think about that one in terms of no problem, because we say it all the time. And you'll hear people now that you know this saying it all the time as well. It drives me bonkers. So let me talk about the 3 pages or 7, 17 pages of notes. So Brian and I brought Jack Daly in for five full days. We paid five days of his fees, which is a lot to bring him in and take a look at our entire call center. Had some great ideas come from that, some great rework come from it, some mistakes as well. We moved way too quickly with a lot of the ideas, but 95% of what we executed on was spectacular and brilliant. What Jack did, though, to start off the five days, really blew us away. And I don't think I've ever seen anyone do it yet. Or since. So we were supposed to meet with Jack at 8:00 clock in the morning on Monday morning to start off the week, to kind of brief on the areas of the business we were going to be focusing on with him and what we were going to do in the call center with him that week. So 8 o'. Clock. So Brian and I, you know, have always had a bit of a mantra if you're not five minutes early or late. So we were going to be there for sure by 7:55, but we said let's get there at 7:45 just so we're on time for Jack. So Brian and I walk into the office together at 7:45 and Jack Daly is standing at the front door pissed off. He's red faced and he's got a yellow notepad, a large yellow notepad with page after page after page of blue Sharpie or he uses these blue fineliner pens, page after page after page of notes. And Jack's like, where have you guys been? We're like, we were told 8am Were we wrong? And he goes, I've been here since five, we got work to do. I'm like, oh shit. All right. So we go walking into one of the meeting rooms with Jack and he sits down with his 17 pages of notes. He goes, when was the last time you guys listened to a phone call that your call center agents make? Brian and I were like, I don't know, like three years. And he goes, well they suck. They're doing it all wrong. Jack got there at five o' clock in the morning and for two and a half hours listened to phone calls with our call center agents until he was tired of listening, but made page after page after page of notes of things that he observed, things that he heard and things that we could do better at. And that's what kickstarted a full week. So think about that in your business as well is when do you inspect what you expect and when was the last time you listened in on your sales people's calls, your customer service people's calls, leadership teams calls? It's amazing how much you can can learn. So what I do is we record a lot of our stuff using Otter and OTTER will actually give you a written transcription that's helpful to be able to edit and give them written feedback, but also you can listen in or watch the calls that they do as well.
