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The first impression you create for customers has never been more important. According to our research, 76% of consumers will stop doing business with you after just one bad experience. When it comes to providing exceptional experiences, there’s one touchpoint can’t afford to overlook — your contact centre.
Your contact centre agents are your customers’ first human interaction with your company. For all intents and purposes, they’re the voice of your brand. To win customer trust and loyalty, you need to ensure that they’re delivering top-tier customer service.
When you train your contact centre agents, you undoubtedly spend a lot of time going over scripts and teaching them what to say. But how much time do you dedicate to teaching them what not to say?
In this post, we’ll cover 15 phrases your contact centre agents should never use, phrases that often upset customers, fuel churn, and damage brand loyalty. We’ll also cover how you can use conversation intelligence to automate quality assurance and detect negative keywords at scale.
Your agents will often need additional context to fully understand a customer’s issue. But this phrasing can feel unempathetic and standoffish. The customer may think your agents aren’t listening or that they’re implying there isn’t a real problem.
Instead, your agents should be more specific about where they need clarification. They should collaborate with the customer to define the problem, and then work towards a solution. For example:
Sometimes, customers call in with issues that fall outside your agents’ scope of responsibilities. Or, customers may try to ask for something beyond your agents’ power, like trying to return an item after an expired warranty.
There truly may be nothing your agent can do to help, but that’s not something they should say to the customer. Their job is to provide assistance, and they should try to find someone at your organisation who can solve the issue. If this isn’t possible, they should use a less combative phrase. For example, they could say:
In our Buyer Experience Report study, 71% of respondents said they believe businesses already know who they are and why they’re calling. In fact, leading organisations send data about the caller’s digital journey to agents before they even pick up the phone, so they can tailor the call to meet their needs. Learn how it works in this blog post or in the video below:
It’s your customers’ baseline expectation that you already have their name and phone number — they will see it as an inconvenience if you ask them for this information. It could also add to their frustration if they have an urgent issue and have already had to wait on hold.
What’s not to love about waiting on hold? You’ve got crackly music to entertain you, automated voice messages to keep you company, and a healthy dose of existential dread as the minutes creep by.
Our recent study showed that 60% of callers will hang up after waiting on hold for ten minutes or less. Your agents, therefore, should let the caller know why they’re being put on hold and for approximately how long. In addition, they should ask the caller if they’re okay with waiting on hold, and offer the option for a callback if not.
Here’s an example of an alternate phrasing:
In recent years, businesses have been treating the contact centre as a cost centre, rather than a revenue driver. As a result, they’ve been cutting staffing and providing a bare-bones experience. You may recall hearing more “higher than expected call volume” messages in recent years than ever before.
As part of this, businesses have tried to direct customers to online help centres, rather than answering their questions over the phone. When your agents try to get a caller off the phone by directing them to your website, it makes them feel like they aren’t valued. It also isn’t very helpful, because chances are they already looked at your website before they called.
It’s okay to send callers to a help page with supplemental information, but you should make sure your agents answer their questions over the phone first.
Customers expect the person on the other end of the phone to be knowledgeable. If your agents don’t have an immediate answer to a customer’s question, they say something reassuring while they search for it, like “Let me find that information for you.”
This demonstrates a lack of empathy. It makes the customer feel as if their feelings aren’t valid and their issue isn’t a genuine concern to your business. Your agents should, instead, sympathise with your customers’ frustrations and assure them that they’ll provide a solution.
When your agents use this phrase, it sounds like they’re blaming the customer for the issue. This kind of fingerpointing is never a good approach for building loyalty! Instead, your agents should take ownership of the problem and look for solutions. They should use phrases like: “I totally understand your frustration. Let’s see what we can do for you.”
Your agents may be tempted to use this line when a difficult issue stumps them. It’s true that your team doesn’t always have a protocol in place for each issue. But that doesn’t make a difference to the caller — all they care about is that their issue gets resolved. Your agents should instead assure the caller that they’re working as quickly as possible to find a solution.
When has this phrase ever improved a situation? Saying this to a frustrated customer is the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a raging fire. After all, nobody likes to be told how they should be feeling.
The best way to calm down a customer isn’t with words — it’s by taking swift action to solve their issue. Instead of “calm down,” your agents should use phrases like:
This phrase comes across as rigid and dismissive. It tells the customer that the company’s “rules” are more important than resolving their issue, which can feel frustrating and unhelpful. Additionally, it doesn’t leave room for compromise or collaboration, shutting down the conversation instead of fostering a solution-focused dialogue.
Alternative Phrasing: I understand this situation might be frustrating. While our current policy is _______, let me see if there’s another way I can assist you.
Hear the demanding tone? Putting the responsibility entirely on the customer, which can feel off-putting and unsupportive, creates an impression that the agent is unwilling to take ownership of the issue or provide guidance. Customers reach out to support teams expecting help and partnership, not a set of instructions delivered without empathy. This phrasing can make them feel like they’re being dismissed rather than supported, especially if they’re already frustrated or overwhelmed.
Alternative Phrasing: Here’s what we can do together to get this resolved. The next step is ______, and I’ll guide you through it.
A lack of accountability can leave the customer feeling stranded with no clear path forward. Customers don’t care about internal job roles or team boundaries—they care about having their problem solved efficiently and with care. When an agent says this, it can come across as passing the buck instead of taking the initiative to ensure the customer’s concern is addressed. Even if the issue genuinely falls outside the agent’s scope, the customer shouldn’t be left with the burden of figuring out who to talk to next or how to escalate their concern. Agents should aim to be facilitators, guiding customers to the right person or department with a sense of ownership and commitment to seeing the issue through.
Some Alternative Phrasing:
Downplaying a customer’s concern invalidates their feelings and can make them feel belittled. What might seem minor to an agent could be a significant issue for the customer, especially if it’s affecting their experience with your product or service. Even if the issue is objectively small, agents should still treat every concern with professionalism, patience, and respect to ensure customers feel heard and valued.
Alternative Phrasing: Wow, thank you for bringing this to our attention. Let’s get this sorted out right away.
This one should go without saying (🤦). Telling a customer they’re wrong is one of the quickest ways to escalate a conversation from tense to outright hostile. This confrontational verbiage will put your customers on the defensive, creating an adversarial dynamic instead of fostering collaboration. Even if the customer is mistaken, directly pointing it out can feel dismissive and disrespectful, making them less receptive to any explanation or resolution that follows. Customer service interactions should aim to de-escalate frustration and build trust, not add fuel to the fire. A more effective approach is to gently clarify misunderstandings while maintaining a helpful and empathetic tone, ensuring the customer feels respected throughout the interaction.
Some Alternative Phrasing:
Conversation analytics platforms like Invoca use AI-powered speech analytics to monitor every call that comes through your contact centre. This means you can automatically analyse the entirety of every single call, even when it’s transferred to an external call centre or local destination.
You define the automated criteria that the AI will use to score the calls — in addition to selecting the phrases you want your agents to say, you can select “negative” phrases that will lower your agents’ scores (for example, the 10 in this post!) With the power of AI, you can move from subjectively scoring some calls to objectively scoring all of them.
In industries like healthcare and financial services, it’s imperative that your agents are following compliance guidelines on every single call. That means you have to analyse every call, not just a sample, to avoid costly fines and penalties. With Invoca, you can monitor all of your agent conversations for non-compliant language. Since conversation analytics are delivered directly after the call ends, you can also address compliance issues immediately instead of days or weeks later when the agent could have potentially handled hundreds of calls in a non-compliant manner.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you improve contact centre agent performance? Check out these resources:
Request your personal demo to see how Invoca can help you improve contact center agent performance.
