With customers, reframing can be used to lessen the impact of an unpleasant situation, make the customer feel better, or make your solutions more palatable. Here are some examples:
Not-so-good response: You will have to pay a penalty because your payment was late.
Better response: There is a small fee for payments that arrive after the fifteenth of the month.
Not-so-good response: You shouldn’t have parked here. It is a no-parking zone.
Better response: People often try to park here without reading the signs. Let me show you the closest place where you can park legally.
Not-so-good response: We can’t get you on a connecting flight until tomorrow.
Better response: We can put you on an overnight connection that will get you home twelve hours from now.
In each of these cases, you aren’t simply sugarcoating the news (that is, minimizing it in a way that the customer can easily see through). Rather, you are framing these situations around the customer’s interests in a way that makes them easier to accept. The key difference is that reframing is primarily intended to benefit the customer rather than to talk the customer into something.
So how do you reframe things yourself, particularly in the middle of a developing customer situation? There are three key principles behind the mechanics of reframing.
Normalizing
This term, originally used in mathematics, means to compare things to a norm. With customers, it means describing a situation that is unusual for them as being more common or normal than they think. Here are some examples:
Situation: A customer’s luggage is lost.
Normalized situation: “Bags often get delayed, and they almost always show up within twenty-four hours.”
Situation: A customer is clueless about how to use a computer.
Normalized situation: “Lots of people find it intimidating to use a computer for the first time. We have some good resources for people who are just getting started.”
Situation: A customer is behaving disruptively.
Normalized situation: “People often get upset when things like this happen. I would like to help you. Can we talk about this?”
Relative Value
This form of reframing revolves around using words to make a situation sound better. Here a delay becomes a short wait, a week becomes seven days, and a fine becomes a small fee. This works best when the comparison is credible (you don’t, for example, want to call a two-month wait “short”) and the intention is to make the customer feel better.
Context Framing
Here, you are putting things in a broader context to make them sound better, such as how you normally handle this situation, what a customer can expect, or what you can do. For instance:
Situation: Your hospital is running at capacity, and there is a wait for beds.
Context framing: “Our normal time frame for admitting your mother during peak periods like this should be about four to six hours. Here is what we can do to make her comfortable in the meantime.”
Situation: A customer is upset because she just flunked her driving examination.
Context framing: “When people need to take the exam over, we can reschedule it as soon as a week later.”
Situation: Someone who just checked in at your hotel is afraid to use the elevator, you are booked solid, and the guest’s room is on the tenth floor.
Context framing: “We often send a bellman to ride with people who don’t like being alone on elevators. Would you like to have me call for someone?”
In each of these cases, things work best when you prepare in advance for how you describe your most common situations. Either way, when you try to see things through the eyes of customers, you can often find a hook that gives them hope, saves face, or helps them feel understood. If you do it well, you can often make a real change in a customer’s perceptions with the words you choose.
How to See People Differently? Take a Seat
You can also reframe your own perceptions of customers themselves, using a simple technique from psychotherapy. The “empty chair” technique, a fundamental part of Gestalt therapy, is used to help people develop insight and perspective about other people. Here is how it works:
First, sit across from an empty chair. Imagine that a person you don’t like, such as one of your most frustrating customers, is sitting in this chair.
Tell the person in the empty chair exactly what you are thinking about him or her. Don’t hold anything back.
Now get up, sit in the empty chair, and respond as you imagine the other person would respond.
Amazing things can happen when you physically and verbally take on other people’s perspectives. You may see their pains, their frustrations, their sides of the story. More important, you learn to describe those people in their voice, using their language. For example, someone you call a “control freak” becomes detail-oriented, a “drama queen” is someone who is often anxious and in need of reassurance, and a “hostile jerk” suddenly turns into someone who may feel voiceless, powerless, or concerned about how his children are being treated.
After you do this exercise (which you can easily do in your head), start using the other person’s language to describe her and think about her in the future. Then see what it does for your own ability to engage people in productive dialogue and problem solving.
When Reframing Is a Bad Idea
As powerful as it is, reframing must be used with caution. Why? Because there is often a thin line between making a difficult customer feel better and BS-ing that person. As a general rule, this approach can be very useful as long as you don’t push it too far.
Perhaps the most important tool in reframing properly is your gut. Listen to what you say through the ears of your customers—especially difficult ones—and then think through how they would react. Here are three situations you need to avoid when reframing:
Sounding Insincere
A little reframing is almost always socially acceptable, but too much of it can make you look foolish. For instance, trying to make an outrageously long delay seem normal, or a particularly bad service experience seem common, can make you seem out of touch instead of helpful.
Minimizing the Customer’s Concerns
As a rule, reframing is meant to minimize your agenda, not the customer’s. So although it is OK to, say, refer to stupid customer behavior as “a common situation,” or your penalties as “a small surcharge,” you should never refer to a customer’s stated concerns as “a minor inconvenience” or a “slight problem.” (In fact, as we discussed in Chapter 2, it is usually best to lean into customers’ agendas and mirror their emotions.)
Being Untruthful
When reframing crosses the line from optimism to dishonesty, you risk losing the trust of your customer—or losing your customer, period.
Ultimately, reframing is a lot like acting: It works best when people are not explicitly aware you are doing it. Using gentle, nonthreatening, benefit-oriented speech will normally help you as long as you keep it within appropriate boundaries. In time, the habit of using these patterns of speaking can become an easy and natural part of who you are.
Our Client Caused an Accident? Get in Line
Once I was involved in a serious auto accident. I was stopped at a red light, in my brand new car, when a large truck plowed into the back of my car without stopping. Thankfully, I was not hurt badly, but it was a frightening experience.
A couple of hours later I was sitting in an auto body repair shop with a splitting headache and my new car crumpled like an accordion, talking on my cell phone with the truck driver’s insurance company. When I finally got through to the claims department, the snippy person on the other end of the line said something like this:
“Sir, you have to understand that we have a large backlog of people with claims, and they all want their cars fixed as badly as you do. You are going to have to wait at least three days before anyone can get back to you about this.”
It is a good thing I specialize in strength-based communications, because I was pretty close to saying some not-very-strength-based things in response! But what really struck me in hindsight was how unnecessary this person’s whole attitude was. Suppose she said:
“I am so sorry to hear that you have been in an accident. How are you doing now? Obviously you want your car fixed as soon as possible, so I am going to personally make sure that someone gets back in touch with you within seventy-two hours.” (Note: Seventy-two hours is the same thing as three days.)
By simply changing a few words around, this person would probably experience a lot less hostility from customers.
A New Perspective
Used well, reframing does much more than make difficult customers feel better; it helps you see a situation differently. It focuses you on solutions and lets you view customers through the same lenses they use. And like any communications skill, it gets better with practice. Start using it as one of your regular tools and see how much it improves your customer work.
PUTTING LEARNING INTO PRACTICE
1. You are going to arrive much later than expected for a plumbing appointment. You know from experience that this customer gets upset about everything. What could you say to lessen the intensity of his reaction?
2. A season ticket holder of the professional football team you work for is being informed that his seats are being moved to a less desirable section so more luxury boxes can be built at your stadium. How would you deliver this news?
3. You are telling one of the patients at your clinic that she has been reported to a credit bureau for not paying her bill on time. How would you word this?
4. A customer is extremely loud and abrasive as she describes a haircut she felt went badly at your salon. Your manager hears this and rushes over. How would you explain the situation to the manager?
CHAPTER 8
Grounding an
Angry Outburst
ANGER IS ONE OF OUR most powerful emotions. It is part of our survival instincts to defend ourselves and our loved ones against harm. But when a customer uses anger against you, it is one of the most uncomfortable experiences you will ever encounter in serving the public.
It is also a nearly universal experience in customer service. Each and every one of us has probably been an angry customer ourselves at some point, and if you serve customers long enough, some of them will be angry with you too. Yet it happens rarely enough that we are often completely unprepared for it, and this in turn leads us to respond counterproductively.
No one likes to be on the receiving end of an angry outburst. But anger can be understood and managed in ways that ground its negative energy and move both parties toward productive dialogue. In this chapter, we outline a three-step process for lowering the heat: (1) choosing the highest level of acknowledgment possible, (2) asking assessment questions that “move toward the pain,” and (3) shifting the discussion from blame to problem solving. Learn these steps and you will have much more control in your very worst customer service situations.
Understanding Customer Anger
Many years ago, as I was wrapping up a training course with my own call-center team, one agent described a customer who was so rude and foulmouthed that she had actually reduced a couple of our employees to tears. Then, in one of the great ironies of my career, this same customer called in the middle of this conversation. I bravely offered to take the call, and soon people were gathered around my cubicle watching Mr. Customer Service Training gasping for air under a torrent of abusive language that would make a sailor blush.
This was not a comfortable situation for me. It probably would not have been comfortable for you either. Yet because I knew what to say and what to do in these situations, within five minutes the customer and I were talking rationally, and within ten minutes we left the call as friends.
What happened in this call was typical of an interaction with a very angry customer. She came into the transaction extremely frustrated and felt that the only way she would get what she wanted was to intimidate me. So she started out by letting me have it with both barrels.
At this point, most people would react by treating this person as an enemy to be contained. They would set boundaries, tell the customer to calm down, or perhaps not react at all. The customer would then probably ramp up the assault, and the dance would continue until both parties were exhausted and upset. This transaction would likely end with one person winning and the other person losing.
This approach usually creates exactly the opposite reactions from what you want. When a customer’s anger triggers a negative reaction from you, the customer attacks even harder to make sure you “get it.” If such customers eventually win, they learn that this kind of behavior works. If they lose, they probably believe they should have stood their ground even more.
In my case, I responded the way I am about to teach you. I let her know that I was hearing both the situation and her anger. I did not judge her or her behavior. I asked questions designed to gather information and calm her down at the same time. Then I framed possible solutions around what she was looking for. As we went through this process, the customer’s mood changed progressively from upset to civil and productive, and we eventually reached a solution that let both of us win.
This is the kind of outcome I want you to have with your worst customers. It was the result of a planned performance that worked as expected. Let’s look at the steps that go into this performance and see how to put it to work with your own angry customers.
Step 1: Use the Highest Acknowledgment Level Possible
In Chapter 3, we talked about the “ladder of acknowledgment” and its four levels: paraphrasing, observation, validation, and identification. Most of the time, different customers and situations call for different levels of acknowledgment.
When a customer is enraged, however, this logic goes completely out the window. There are many reasons why customers are unhappy, but only one reason they become angry: They do not feel heard. They feel voiceless and powerless, and respond by puffing themselves up and confronting you until you pay attention to them. So you must head straight for the highest level of the ladder you can: Either identify with them or at the very least validate them.
This means that the first step in calming down upset customers is likely the very last thing you feel like doing: acknowledging them as deeply and with as much gusto as possible. Here’s an example:
Customer: I am absolutely furious with this stupid product! This is the third time it has broken down and I have had to come back! What is the matter with you people?
Not-so-good response (defensive): Please calm down, sir!
Not-so-good response (paraphrasing): So your product broke down again.
Not-so-good response (observation): I can see you are very angry.
Better response (identification): Wow, three times! That would bother me too! Let’s take a closer look at this.
Customer: I tried to get a refund on this, and your clerk was so rude to me! I am really upset right now.
Not-so-good response (defensive): Well, ma’am, we do have a no-refund policy.
Not-so-good response (paraphrasing): So you weren’t happy about the way you were treated.
Not-so-good response (observation): This obviously bothered you.
Better response (validation): No one wants to feel disrespected, so I am really glad you are letting me know. Please tell me more about what happened.
See what a difference your response can make here? Here, your level of acknowledgment (identification or validation), your language (responding in detail), and your tone (matching the customer’s level of urgency) all play a role in creating an effective response. Be right there with the customers in their anger, no matter how much you agree or disagree with them, and watch most of these situations start to calm down.
Finally, do not underestimate the impact of your own feelings at this stage. Anger from customers often feels frightening and inappropriate,
particularly if they start out angry with no provocation from you. Every fiber of your being will want to withdraw, fight back, or defend yourself. And each of these self-protective behaviors will only make the other person angrier. Your best defense? Learn and practice what to say long before your next angry encounter, so that the right words will be there when you need them.
The Vengeful Customer
After a dealer failed to fix his expensive imported sports car—reportedly damaging it further in the process—a man in China subsequently felt he received no satisfaction from either the dealer or the car’s manufacturer. So he decided to take his frustrations out in public. In front of a large crowd, with news cameras rolling to capture the event, a hired crew of men in blue jumpsuits took sledgehammers to the car and destroyed it.
He is far from alone. A 2011 New York Times article described someone who wasn’t happy about his wedding photographers’ missing the last fifteen minutes of his ceremony and, according to this customer, yelling at him when he called to complain about it. So he sued the photographers to re-create the entire wedding ceremony, at a cost of $48,000—despite the fact that he and his bride are now long divorced. And even if these photographers win in court, they have lost: Their legal bills have now topped $50,000, more than they would have paid to settle the suit.
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