What Are Probing Questions?

Probing questions are questions that you ask to gain greater insight into what someone has just told you, helping you to uncover the reasons and emotions behind what they have said.

In a call center, we ask probing questions for each of the three reasons below:

There are grey areas in the information that the customer has given you.
You cannot be sure of the customer’s intended outcome.
The customer does not sound convinced by the course of the conversation.

Just remember, there are two parts to asking probing questions, finding out the facts behind the situation and determining the customer’s feelings.

There are those functional questions that you ask to find out who they are and what has happened. But we also want to ask probing questions for an equally, if not more, important purpose, and that is to understand how they feel.
If you can understand how they feel, you can understand why they have contacted you and, crucially, how you can best help them.