Donna
Siegel

Customer Service: Helping Difficult Customers

Who likes dealing with difficult customers? Many smart companies. Here's why: Difficult people have a tough time getting what they want from all the vendors they deal with. If you're one of the rare people who masters the skills of Customer Service: Helping Difficult Customers, you'll likely end up with an extremely loyal customer base that returns to you every time.

"I don't know what's wrong with that company. I call and call, and all I get is a message telling me to be patient and wait. I'm running out of patience. After all, I don't have all day to hang around here waiting until they're ready to talk to me. That's not the way it should work. They must have lied to me, because when I bought this service, they told me all I had to do was call, and they would be right over to help me. It's just not fair. I spent good money, even though my husband said there was a better way to spend $638. Why can't they give me what they promised?"

At the same time, you as the customer service rep might be saying something like:

"Like most reps, I believe my job is to help customers. Some customers make it easy to be helpful; others are just a pain right from the beginning. I wish customers could be more understanding. I would like to give them exactly what they want, but I have rules about what I can and cannot do. If only I could change the rules, I'd make everyone's life easier."

A Difficult Situation From Both Perspectives

When customers are annoyed, angry, irritated or just plain out-of-sorts, it's an uncomfortable time for everyone. The customers can't seem to get what they need; the rep feels put upon and unhappy about having to deal with the customers. The success of their interaction will be decided very quickly. If they can work together, they will probably come to some outcome that will at least satisfy both of them. If they fail to communicate, it's likely that the situation will escalate or, even worse, the company may lose a few customers forever. The problem is that bad news travels twice as far as good news. Do something nice for customers, and they may tell three people. Get customers upset, and they may tell ten people.

Before determining what to do about upset customers, it's important to understand what is likely to be going on. The majority of people aren't difficult by nature. For the most part, they act rationally, and they expect us to act the same way. In fact, a lot of customers are really easy. Whatever you do to them, they just smile and say "thank you." These kind souls are the ones every rep likes to get -- it makes the customer service process much easier. Occasionally, you encounter people who are really mean -- they just overreact to everything, because that's how they deal with life in general. These people make it a point to make others feel as uncomfortable as possible -- and as a customer service rep, you may be one of their targets.

If you take out the few people who are really easy and the few who just want to be offensive, you are left with the majority of your customers. They are usually rational, but something or someone has failed them. Their anger is caused by some type of frustration with your company, your product or service, their job, their family, their car or any one of a thousand other factors. They are angry and usually know that they are acting somewhat irrationally. Whatever the cause, it is really just the surface reaction to an internal fear that someone or something has put a limitation on them. Angry or difficult customers perceive that they will not get what they want or need -- that there is some barrier between them and their desired goal. Take the woman on the phone in the opening section. She appears to be angry about being on hold. Behind that is her fear that she won't get the help she needs to resolve her problem and a certain sense of guilt of having wasted her money.

So when you get right down to the heart of the matter, customers become difficult, because they perceived barriers between what they want and what they expect. The best way to help angry customers is to remove the barriers.

Removing The Barriers For Angry People

When we get into conversations with angry people, we have to ask ourselves: "What do they really want from us?" In addition to all the same things that other customers want, angry customers want two things:

• Empathy with their circumstances.
• Success or some sign of success, no matter how small.

Using empathy with angry customers
The first thing angry customers want from you is empathy with their circumstances. Empathy is some sort of sympathetic or human response. It includes expressions of concern or caring, such as: "I understand," or "I'm sorry you're upset."

Your empathy expresses your personal concern about customers as human beings; it tells customers that you are someone who genuinely cares about them and their problem. Empathy alone can go a long way to remove the anger from difficult customers.

Creating a success for angry customers
The second thing angry customers want from you is some type of success. In other words, they want to "win." What constitutes a win will vary from one customer to another. While in some cases, you might be able to resolve the entire issue and give customers exactly what they want, in others you won't have this ability. For example: customers might want something that is outside your ability to deliver (a change in policy, an exception to a rule). Or, it might take time to find out more about the situation before it can be resolved. Or, you might need to refer the customers to another employee or department.

Even in situations where you can't resolve the issue immediately, you can still offer success to customers. While customers want resolution, they are often content with signs that tell them that resolution is coming. The important thing is that they walk away from their interaction with you believing that they are better off now than they were before they talked with you.

Process For Helping Difficult Customers

You sometimes have difficult customers who are clearly upset. You want to make sure they get both empathy and some form of success. How do you do that? Here is a 7-step process for helping customers:

1. Let customers vent
2. Offer to help
3. Get to the root of the problem
4. Define success for the interaction
5. Offer a solution
6. Gain verbal agreement
7. Present a roadmap of the next steps

Step 1: Let customers vent
Before you can begin to do much of anything with angry customers, you first have to let them vent. The customers want to tell you that they are angry and want someone to do something about it. They have saved up this feeling of anger, and they have to release it. The release is very important to both you and the customers. While the information is rattling around in the customers' heads, they can't think about anything else. Until the customers tell you why they are angry, they won't have the capacity to listen to anything you say. Their anger occupies their full attention.

So the best thing you can do at the start of your interaction is to let the customers talk. The customers release the tension, while at the same time you get a chance to:

• Find out what is on the customers' minds.
• Discover what the customers think will resolve the issue.

Have customers recognize that they are over reacting, which is probably leading to their not being more receptive to a solution.

Demonstrate to customers that you really care about the helping them.

While customers are venting, your job is to just listen, or maybe take a few notes. Whatever else you do, it's important that you remain calm and professional so the customers' level of anger doesn't escalate. Just listen until the customers hit a natural pausing point and are ready to listen to you.

Step 2: Offer to help
The next step in working with angry customers is offering help. Once  customers have stopped venting, they are ready to get down to resolving the problem. And your offer to help signals your willingness to participate in the process of resolving their problem. Typical expressions for making this offer to help include: "Let's see if we can work together to help you" and "Maybe I can be of some help." Notice that a good offer to help makes the offer, but does not imply any promise of outcome. That is because at this point, you can't guarantee an outcome of any type. You don't know enough yet.

Step 3: Get to the root of the problem
In the third step, you need to know exactly what is bothering your customers. It's not always clear for several reasons. People often come in and they are just angry; they might not even know why. Sometimes they are just confused and don't even know what's bothering them. Other times, they just don't know what the source of the problem is. If the situation is complicated, they might have identified the wrong factors for resolving the problem.

Your task is to determine the exact cause of the problem so that you can help resolve it. And your tools for getting to the root of the problem are the same that you use to find any other customers' needs: active listening and asking questions. The most effective questions for getting to the root of the problem are open-ended questions that help the customers tell you what is causing their frustration. Effective questions include: "What seems to be wrong with this product?" as well as "How have you been trying to use this product?"  Other questions include: "What happened the last time you used this service?" and "Can you describe step by step what happened?" Your questions should encourage customers to provide you with details that will ultimately lead to the resolution of the problem.

Note that in most cases, the process of answering questions often has a calming effect on customers. The customers begin to see this step as the start of resolving the problem and are most often willing to answer as many questions as you ask.

Step 4: Define success for the interaction
In addition to discovering the exact nature of the problem, your questions will often lead to the definition of what customers see as a successful conclusion from their conversation with you. Remember, the definition of success may not be the total resolution of the problem or question; it can also be a first step along a path to resolution (as long as it is clear to the customers what the path might be).

Step 5: Offer a solution
Once you know the problem the customers really have, and you know the minimum step required for them to have some level of success, you are ready for the next step -- offer the solution. The solution is either the resolution of the issue or the success you can give the customers today. But, rather than just offer your solution, you have to set the stage for the customers to understand the benefits of your solution.

Present customers with information in this order:

• Paraphrase the customers' problem and its cause as you understand it. This reassures customers that you have heard what they have said. More importantly, it clearly identifies the problem you are preparing to resolve.
• Identify the solution you are ready to implement. This can be either the total resolution of the issue or the success you can give the customers at this time. Remember the success must match the customers and be something they will value.
• Explain why the success leads to getting the customers' problem resolved. It may be obvious, but it never hurts to make the connection between the resolution of the problem and your offer for assistance.

Step 6: Gain verbal agreement
Before you take any action, you want to make sure that the customers acknowledge that your action will be helpful in remedying the problem. You have to make sure the customers agree verbally. This step is very important to ensure that the customers believe the step you are about to take is actually a step towards resolving the problem. If not, you want to uncover any concerns or hesitation before taking action.

Since you have just identified the customers' problem, your solution and the reason why you think your solution will resolve the problem, it is easy to continue by saying: "Do you think my proposed step will resolve this problem for you?" and then wait to hear what the customers have to say.

Step 7: Present a roadmap of the next steps
The final step in the process for helping angry customers is to present a roadmap of the next steps. That is, to describe what is going to happen next. Customers need the reassurance of a roadmap, even when the issue is going to be resolved quickly.

In some cases, you can resolve the problem right then and there. Then your next steps are those that you are going to take: "I'm going to take this statement up to my supervisor for her approval. Then I'll be back to give you your refund."

In other situations, it is going to take time. Here it becomes even more important that customers know that there are next steps. Otherwise the customers might assume that their issue will just fall into a deep black hole, never to be thought of again (and that might make customers angry all over again). Even if you cannot describe all of the steps for resolution, make sure you tell the customers something. For example:

"It's going to take some time to review all these transactions and make sure you have the right information. After our conversation, I'm going to take your information to our research group, and I'm going to describe to them exactly what you have told me. You can expect a call from one of them within the next two days giving you an update on their progress."

SeaBird Associates Inc
3011 NE 7th Drive
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Phone: 561-750-9233
E-mail: Donna Siegel

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