3 Psychosocial Techniques for Contact Center & Technical Support Representative

When people make a call to a contact center, most of the time, they’re trying to resolve a problem. At face value, this doesn’t seem like such a complicated mechanism: customer calls, a representative answers, a query is made, and then resolution is given—done! That’s how the ideal customer service experience is supposed to happen. Even appointment setting service providers have difficulty in sifting through qualified leads, how much more difficult must it be for technical support service providers to be receiving hostile inquiries from people they vaguely know?


There are reasons why there are go-to phrases that contact centers always have on their playbook—these words and phrases all endeavor to positively affect a customer. Knowing these words and phrases tell you “What” to say but they aren’t all-cures. A different situation might need you to say the same sense but in a different packaging that’s why you also need to learn the “How” and “Why”.

Foot in the Door

Foot in the Door is a compliance tactic that basically says that if you get a person to say yes to a number of small, seemingly insignificant requests, there is a very high chance that that same person is going to say yes to a bigger request. This principle applies both to sales and to troubleshooting. Lines that fall under this certain tactic may include:

• If I understand correctly, what you meant to say was [proceed to reiterate the customers point]
• Can you hold on while I figure this out for you?
• Would you like to try this simpler option?

No matter how you look at it, a yes is still a yes and this snowball of small agreements could help close a deal or just make the conversation run smoother.

Benjamin Franklin Effect

Similar to Foot in the Door, the Benjamin Franklin Effect aims to make a person more agreeable by making them do favors. This may seem counter intuitive but fact of the matter is, when you do more things for someone else, you tend to become more attached to that person instead of that person growing more attached to you—such is the tendency of suitors giving gifts to people they want to win over; they fall more but the same cannot be said for the other person. Technical support service providers can use this by making requests appear like favors.

• Can you do me a favor and click that for me?
• May you please find the item on the dropdown menu?

Why this works is because the more people do for someone else, the more they feel invested and thus attached. Add a “thank you so much” after every compliant action to help consummate the favor-giving experience.

Denomination Effect & Unit Bias

These are two different principles but they may go hand in hand. The Denomination Effect make people perceive that they aren’t spending a lot if they spend in smaller denominations. The Unit Bias on the other hand is the tendency to want to finish a “unit” of something, ie, food, a chapter of a book, a subscription that has run halfway.

The Denomination Effect can be observed in statements like:

It’s only ___ dollars for X months!
You can pay for it by only this much monthly.
If you look at it, it only costs you around X cents a day.

Notice that the technique is actually to break the terms into seemingly smaller and more manageable amount. In the same vein, technical support service representative can use Unit Bias to make people feel a loss for a refund or for cutting a subscription short of its paid span.



These are but a number of principles you can explore to further enrich the knowledge and technique base of a contact center workforce. There are much more techniques and principles that explain an abundance more of why certain phrases work for certain people and we’ll discuss them in the next articles to come.