Chapter 9

 The Angry Customer

Imagine that someone breaks a promise to you. Or that a product you bought last week breaks down just when you really need it. Or that a company doesn’t deliver the service you paid your hard-earned money for. Do you feel your teeth clenching, your fists tightening, and your blood beginning to boil? Relax! This imagining stuff is just a cheap ploy to introduce this really important chapter.

Everyone—even your dear old grandma—sometimes loses their cool when they feel like a victim of a dirty trick.

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 Quote, Unquote
Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger rests in the bosom of fools.
—Ecclesiastes 7:9

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A few years ago, Ron was traveling through Dallas Ft. Worth Airport on American Airlines to give a very important speech in Kansas City. The winds of fate blew cold that day and his connection from Dallas to K.C. was canceled. Gripped by the fear of missing his talk, he frantically called the airline’s frequent flyer Hot Line to make other arrangements.

Now most people normally describe Ron as a sweet, almost angelic man (some even call him by his nickname, St. Ron). But on that morning, even he admits he wasn’t the most pleasant individual when he called for help. He was angry, frustrated, and scared to death that he’d disappoint his customer waiting for him to touch down and go to work.

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 At Your Service
Anger is perhaps your most powerful emotion. And it’s probably more contagious than kindness. One of the best ways to immunize yourself from customer anger is to focus on facts. Often, people get more and more angry because they’re confused as well as disappointed. The more you and your unhappy customer focus on cold, hard facts, the less you’ll get caught up in red-hot emotions. You’ll have a happier customer sooner, and a less-stressful workday for yourself.

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Standing at a pay phone, covered in a cold sweat, Ron worked his way through the airline’s mind-numbing phone mail options. (Push One if you want to hold forever. Push Two if you’d like us to transfer you to another busy extension. Push Three to speak to someone who totally has no idea what you’re talking about. . . .)

When he finally got a live customer service representative on the other end of the phone, Ron concentrated more on his emotional need to yell rather than finding a solution to his pressing problem.

However, even in the face of a screaming angel, the understanding customer service representative saved the day for both of them. She turned the initial conflict into a win-win situation. After patiently listening to Ron’s frustrations, she gave him a choice of options to choose from. She told Ron she would be more than happy to listen to him complain some more, or, he could calm down and give her the necessary information she needed to get him on the next plane to K.C. in time to give his speech.

With this careful handling, Ron resisted his impulse to continue yelling. His rational side took over. He got hold of his erupting emotions and became more like his angelic self. A bit calmer, he gave information to the American Airlines Customer Service Representative that empowered her to provide a solution to get Ron off the phone and onto a plane to Kansas City.

Let Me Help You

The truth of the matter is that most people in customer service situations really do want to solve their customers’ problems, even when the customers are whining lunatics. However, if you don’t follow the basic model of conflict resolution, you’re more likely to get sucked into the customer’s tornado of emotions. When that happens, you have nothing but two out-of-control maniacs who aren’t solving a problem. And that’s a double shame since customer anger really is an easy issue to overcome.

The key is to bypass all the emotional issues using a technique commonly known as Conflict Resolution.

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 At Your Service
It’s easy for consultants or seminar leaders to give you advice such as, “Don’t take it personally.” Sure. Let’s see how that works. Listen [insert your name here], “You’re slow, confused, and totally incompetent. And your breath smells bad, too! But don’t take it personally.” Well, that last little bit of assurance made everything okay, right? Give us a break! Not taking personally another’s criticism or outbursts of emotion requires a disciplined focus on task and technique. That usually requires training—and re-training—to teach and refresh those skills.

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By the time you answer a customer’s call for help, the person on the other end of the line or counter is feeling a lot of pain. Some of the pain was mental anguish caused by the performance (or lack of performance) of your products and services. Some of the pain may have been caused by your company’s less-than-perfect method for delivering service.

People who get trapped in your system feel that they’re caught in a maze—not only are they angry about their initial problem, now they’re frustrated by the intended solution!

Most likely, you’ve had the experience of being lost in the “phone zone” of voice mail, getting your call forwarded to people who can’t help, or simply not being able to find anyone who has both the information and the authority to solve your problem.

The bottom line is that the person on the other end of the phone, or across the counter, is really (and quite understandably) upset. And, like it or not, you’re the target of their pent-up frustration.

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 Tales from the Real World
A former colleague of Don’s was once a high-powered attorney in Washington, D.C. who worked nearly around the clock constantly. He developed a terrible heart condition that his doctor said was caused by stress. The doctor told his distressed patient to rethink his commitment to his clients. “Remember,” said the good doctor, “these are your client’s problems, not your problems.” Moral of the story: it’s a good thing to care for your customers, and a bad thing to care so much that you take on emotional burdens that don’t help you help your customers.

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In reality it’s hard to separate our personal feelings from a customer’s attack on our products or company. However, there is one way of looking at a potential conflict that can take the edge off for you.

Milton Gralla, author of How Good Guys Grow Rich, claims that one of the reasons he was successful in building his publishing empire Gralla Communications was because he knew the value of upset customers. He realized that when someone calls to complain, you’re guaranteed to have their undivided attention. Name any other time you are guaranteed to have your customer’s undivided attention.

A customer’s undivided attention allows you to re-establish the value of your company and enhance the relationship. It allows you to provide solutions that will never be forgotten. It allows you to strengthen the wall that keeps the competition out. Now, when you see an upset customer through this perspective, it kind of makes it easier to deal with the individual.

Let’s Play Win-Win Customer Service

There are several possible endings you can have in trying to resolve a conflict. And only one ending you want to achieve all the time.

I Lose—You Win

No matter how well you run your business, your company is going to make mistakes and upset customers. And it’s imperative that you turn a bad situation into a pleasant one. However, if by doing so you are putting yourself or your company at risk of losing a substantial amount of money without any real pay-off, then you’re in trouble. You may have solved a customer’s problem, but have created a huge one for yourself. Solve your customers’ problems without giving away the store.

I Win—You Lose

In this scenario, you probably did what you had to do to get the customer off of the phone, but did you really solve the customer’s problem? You may feel relieved because you no longer have to deal with the situation, but you will definitely feel the pain later on when the customer disappears for good.

I Lose—You Lose

Obviously, you want to avoid this scenario. But understand that even though you know this is a situation to avoid, this basically is the outcome when you lose your cool with the customer. The customer leaves upset, you’re upset, and you have lost a customer. Now that’s upsetting!

I Win—You Win

This is obviously the most desired outcome of the four. You manage to keep your respect and sanity intact, and your customer manages to get a solution in a manner that’s considered a positive moment of truth. The overall relationship is left at a minimum undamaged, and possibly enhanced.

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 At Your Service
Getting to a mutually agreeable solution for your upset customer requires more than defusing explosive anger and soothing intense disappointment. You must provide specific solutions and make sure your customer both understands and agrees to those solutions. Before hanging up the phone, say to the customer, “Here’s what’s going to happen now,” and then review with the customer the specific actions that will follow your conversation. Ask, “Does that meet with your satisfaction?” If the answer is “no,” ask the customer what else you can do to make him or her happy.

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Three Steps to Resolve Conflicts

As we said earlier, Conflict Resolution is really easy to handle as long as you understand the basic needs and wants of your fellow human beings. The bottom line is everyone would love to have a solution to their total liking. However, in the real world many times this isn’t possible. What’s crucial is not so much that your customer totally likes your solution, but rather how well you have dealt with the overall situation. This is what determines whether or not your customer will come back for more. After all, we all know that mistakes do happen.

Are You Telling Me What I Told You?

The key to any successful conflict resolution is your ability to hear your customer. As mentioned in Chapter 8, there’s a distinct difference between listening to your customer and hearing your customer. Since this is crucial to conflict resolution, we want to briefly stress the difference again.

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 At Your Service
Diffusing a customer’s boiling temper is a pretty easy thing to do if you follow these three steps:

1. Listen and understand what your customer is saying.
2. Acknowledge to your customer that you heard and understand him, so he will understand that you understand him. (You understand?)
3. Act on what your customer is complaining about.

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Hearing your customer is the physical act of taking in through your ears what is being said. Listening to your customer is the emotional act of understanding what your customer is really saying.

If you don’t take the time to truly listen to your customer, how can you respond with an appropriate question or statement? If you don’t clarify the customer’s perceptions and their definitions of words being used, how can you be sure that your solution will be adequate?

Oftentimes you might be pushed away from hearing your customer by the harsh attitude they display. It’s imperative that you find the inner strength to see beyond the emotions and identify the cold hard facts. Once the cold hard facts are addressed, the emotions will eventually subside. If you attempt to deal with the emotions without identifying the cold hard facts, you won’t successfully resolve the conflict.

Customers are intelligent and intuitive. They know when you’re trying to stroke them and when you’re offering them substance. Listen and hear their complaint!

Acknowledge Me, or I Won’t Listen to You!

After not listening to your customers, the next worst thing you can do to them is not acknowledge the pain they feel. Failing to acknowledge the pain is a clear indication that the customer wasn’t being heard, resulting in a negative Instant of Absolute Judgement (discussed in Chapter 4).

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 At Your Service
Several studies conducted by business professors reveal that the vast majority of unhappy customers (more than 90 percent) never complain. But those who do complain and then have their complaint dealt with quickly and fairly tend to be more satisfied than customers who never even had a problem! Plus, get this, they are more likely to be a repeat customer! Moral of the story: make your customers unhappy and then happy? Well, not exactly. Welcome complaints and deal with them promptly and fairly.

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When someone’s really hurting they can’t think of anything but pain. Think about the emotions that would go through your mind if you felt your pain was not being acknowledged when you suffered a wrong. Ouch! You’ll be in no mood to hear anyone’s solution to your problem as long as you’re focused on the fact that your pain was not recognized.

Not hearing the solution results in failed communication. And that can be more disappointing than no communication at all. The customer service person you’re dealing with may have communicated a solution to you. But your anger and frustration didn’t allow you to hear it, so it really was never implemented. Since the solution was never put into effect, your problem was never solved and your resentment continues.

Always acknowledge your customer’s complaint and pain. In Ron’s story mentioned earlier, the first thing the customer service representative at American Airlines told Ron was that she was truly sorry he missed his plane and understood the severity of the situation. Hearing that, Ron knew this individual was truly in his corner and ready to help him. So he was ready to give American Airlines another shot at earning his respect and his repeat business.

So What Are You Going to Do About It?

Okay, you have heard—in the listening way—your customer and have acknowledged your customer’s complaint and pain. So what are you going to do about it? Acknowledgment without action is still a clear indication that your customer was not heard.

Some people confuse apologizing with taking action. Apologizing for a situation is not action. It is justifying one’s emotions. A customer might feel good about an apology. But an apology without remedy is like an empty gift box.

In management circles, there’s even debate as to whether or not you should apologize. There are many stories where a vendor apologized for a mishap and wound up being sued because the apology was seen as an admittance of guilt. We know you have to do what’s right for your company to protect yourself at all times.

For example, instead of apologizing like:

Acknowledge the issue and move on by saying:

The key points here:

1. You acknowledged the situation.
2. You put the focus on taking action and moving toward a solution.

Action means:

• Clearly communicating how you’re going to solve the problem.
• Doing whatever you can within your power to positively affect your customer’s situation.
• Seeking a plan that links both your customer and your company to a common goal.
• Assuring that a solution is actually implemented for your customer.

Remember, you can’t always give a customer precisely what they want from your company. You and your customer both know the world isn’t perfect. The key to satisfying your customer who desperately wants a quick, fair solution is to get to work on it while showing empathy for the person.

Fine Arts: Conflict Resolution, Problem Solving

As with anything else, if you follow the rules, you will have a better chance of succeeding. Next we will talk about some rules for successfully engaging in the dual arts of conflict resolution and problem solving.

Understand It’s Your Problem

You know that you didn’t cause the customer’s problem and the pain the customer is feeling. The customer may or may not know this. But guess what, the customer doesn’t really care. All the customer wants is to be heard and have the problem attended to. Fairly, promptly, and courteously.

Since you are the one who answered the bell, then you’re the one who has to handle the problem. As long as a customer has a problem, you have a problem. As long as a customer has a problem, your company has a problem. As long as your customer has a problem, you run the risk of falling victim to a negative public image. And maybe its aftershock: unemployment.

Take responsibility for resolving the situation to the customer’s satisfaction. You will do no more important work in a day than that.

Clearly Communicate Expectations

It’s imperative that you get the expectations of your customer out in the open, as well as making clear the kind of resolution your company can offer and stay in business. Clearly, in a friendly way, vocalize your expectations and needs. As the American Airlines Representative said to Ron, “I can only help you get to where you want to go if you give me the information I need.”

Sometimes, when a customer feels particularly offended by your firm, or if the customer was expecting something more than what you can offer her, merely handling the original problem may not be good enough. Try the following:

• Tell the customer that your company really appreciates her business.
• Sincerely express to her you that you deeply appreciate the injustice she has suffered.
• Assure her that you have made available to her every remedy the company makes available to you.

If the customer still seems unsatisfied, ask, “What else could I possibly do to show our appreciation for your being our customer?” Sometimes, all the customer wants is to let off a little more steam and get a stronger dose of empathy. Sometimes they want a letter of acknowledgement from the company president. The good news is that uncovering and then satisfying the customer’s real “want” may result in a happy and relatively inexpensive solution. And keeping an otherwise lost customer.

Solve the Problem

Every day you get up, you have a certain amount of emotional energy to spend. It’s your choice as to how you spend it. You can spend it resenting someone for their actions towards you, or you can spend it helping to turn bad situations into positive ones.

Resenting a situation or person wastes a whole lot of energy. In the end, you are still miserable and you haven’t positively influenced the situation. That’s lose-lose! By using the energy to solve a problem, you will feel better about the situation, and your customer will feel better. The winds of peace blow away the stress accompanying the storm (okay, we’re not poets). In fact, a positive resolution often leads to a feeling of euphoria, accomplishment, and self-confidence.

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 At Your Service
You can solve customer problems using conflict resolution skills while keeping a few basics in mind. All you have to do is:

• Understand that the customer problem becomes your problem, while not taking the customer’s anger or frustration personally
• Clearly communicate expectations
• Solve the problem

 

In the context of customer service, conflict resolution is nothing more than realizing you have a responsibility to understand and deal with people’s problems. It need not be complicated. Only when people make it too complex does it turn into a nightmare. Keep the tasks in perspective, the emotions at bay, and watch your customer’s problems get resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

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Never Take It Personally

As we said earlier, the irate or upset customer doesn’t know you personally. So, the customer’s actions and words aren’t addressed to you personally. They are conveyed to you only because you are the physical target available for venting frustration and anger. You’re getting hit simply because you happen to be there.

So never take the anger, criticism, and negativity personally. This is easy to say and hard to do when you’re in the thick of battle. However, if you do take it personally, then you will wind up striking back and just antagonizing the customer more. As you’d expect, this will only lead to greater pain and frustration for both the customer and you.

Dr. Scott Peck in the hugely successful book The Road Less Traveled talks about the concept of growth and pain. He says that pain is the natural outcome and feeling of growth and change. And it is our choice to determine what pain we want to feel in our lives. We can feel the pain of change and growth up front, or we can feel the greater pain of not realizing our goals and dreams.

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 Quote, Unquote
He profits most who serves best.
—Motto for Rotary International

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In customer service, you and your organizations will grow by dealing with the pain of listening to your customers’ complaints, rejections, and criticisms. Many times, this leads to the additional pain of making changes to satisfactorily meet the needs and wants of your customers. While this is painful, realize it’s not as painful as having your customers leave and give their business to the competition. When that happens, it can lead to unemployment for you. Now that’s what you call pain!

The bottom line: to be human means to have emotions. To give good customer service we don’t deny our humanity, we stay aware of it. We make every attempt to honor the customer’s humanity with acceptance, empathy, dignity, and most of all, solutions to what ails them in the first place.

Two Commandments

Because we’re basing the premise of this whole book on the notion that today customer service is a cultural issue versus a departmental issue, we would be remiss if we didn’t hit upon the important subject of Crisis Management Communication and the two commandments you must adhere to at all times.

Acknowledge a Crisis at the Onset

History has served up important lessons that show what happens when a company or individual tries to dodge acknowledging the existence of a crisis. Look back to the Exxon Valdez oil tanker fiasco when Exxon chief Lawrence Rawl stonewalled journalists. All that official silence did was fuel the distrust of the public and cause a backlash where customers cut their Exxon credit cards in disgust. The opposite side of the coin is the classic Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Tylenol tampering case. In that instance, where some kook poisoned bottles of Tylenol, J&J’s CEO James Burke acknowledged the crisis on its first night and ordered all Tylenol off the supermarket shelves until the situation was resolved.

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 Watch It!
Recognize that there is a difference between an incident and a crisis. Not every problem that has received media attention ranks as a crisis requiring top management attention and an all-out “war room” approach. Deal with incidents using appropriate measures. Overreacting may indicate that a situation is more severe than it really is and cause undue alarm. That can do as much or more damage than the problem itself.

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Now which corporate executive do you think came out on top? By acknowledging the crisis, James Burke was able to get everyone moving together toward a solution. With Exxon’s refusal to acknowledge the Valdez oil spill, everyone was involved in pointing the blame versus working together toward a solution. Acknowledgment up front not only appeases your customers, but also eliminates the opportunity for your competitors to spread or capitalize on false rumors. You remove the competitor’s trump card. By the time Exxon came around to acknowledging what happened with that oil spill in Alaska, it had to deal with the public-relations nightmare of dispelling all of the untruths that developed lives of their own before the company could effectively deal with the real problem situation.

Do yourself a favor and acknowledge a disastrous incident up front. Then get to work making things work better. Remember, by acknowledging a disaster, we aren’t suggesting that you apologize and accept blame. Acknowledging the situation is merely an act of admitting that it does exist and creates an atmosphere conducive to moving toward a solution.

Tie Your Actions to Corporate Mission

Make sure that your crisis management strategy supports your corporate mission. To see how this is vital, look back at the Sears Auto Service Fraud Cases in California and New Jersey in 1992. Sears for years had spent hundreds of millions of dollars building a reputation based on trust. And the day the company was accused of systematically overcharging for car repairs in California, their initial strategy was to duck. They even went so far as to claim the charges were politically motivated and denied any fraud. Finally, after the state of New Jersey cited all six of Sears NJ Auto Centers one week later for conducting unnecessary repairs, Sears realized it needed to change course and implement a strategy supportive of its corporate mission, which was based on trust.

But the damage was done. Sears had spent years developing a tradition of trust with its customers, but a great deal of it vanished during that crisis creating a need for major repairs to the company’s reputation. When a crisis hits, ask the following:

If it isn’t, then change strategies immediately. Otherwise, all your years of goodwill and service surely will be swallowed up by the poisoned waters of the crisis.