These are examples of people who flip the switch from being unhappy customers to being vengeful ones. Others express their displeasure by creating anti-corporate websites or viral videos on YouTube, or by launching class-action suits. Many businesses dismiss these customers as simply being unappeasable. But it is rarely the case that you have no control over their existence. Here are some common denominators you will often find among customers who fight back:
They are reacting—sometimes overreacting—to a legitimate grievance. One elderly woman became a folk hero of sorts by going to her cable company and smashing its office equipment with a hammer. This wasn’t a case of someone forgetting to take her Prozac; she had repeatedly gotten nowhere requesting service and decided to take matters into her own hands. And she was more than happy to be interviewed about it afterward.
You humiliated them. Most actions have an equal or greater reaction. When one social networking site banned a prominent blogger for twenty-four hours after she innocuously posted a picture that violated one of the site’s terms of service, she responded with a video of how unreachable and bureaucratic this site was for all five thousand of her fans to see.
You simply didn’t care. One professor had a bad flight experience on a long international trip. He repeatedly contacted the airline to complain and eventually received a response the airline itself later acknowledged was “slow, impersonal and insufficiently candid.” He respondedby starting a consumer website that aired grievances about this airline. It has existed for over fifteen years and gets up to thirty thousand hits per month.
So how do you prevent customers from taking public action against you? Here are some of the most important steps:
Do the right thing first. Look at your business through the eyes of your customers. If you have poor quality, insufficient redress for problems, or labyrinthine refund policies, then your most difficult customers will react the way you or I might—only more so.
Drop the insincere corporatespeak. If you reply to customers with stilted prose written by your lawyers or bean counters, such as, “We regret that we are unable to offer you a refund,” then vengeful customers are not a random accident—they are a likely occurrence. Be open, honest, and informal about your boundaries and the reasons for them, and most people will respect you.
Reach out to your critics. Provide solutions, or at least face-saving alternatives. Far too often, vengeful customers are reacting to being ignored as much as they are to being wronged.
Step 2: Ask Assessment Questions
Think about the last time you dealt with the police. Hopefully not in handcuffs, but rather the last time you suffered a break-in or auto accident, or needed some other kind of assistance. What do you remember most about that encounter?
When I ask audiences this question, most reply that the officer did a good job of calming everyone down. At the same time, most never really stopped to notice how they did this. The answer is that the officer probably did something good officers are trained to do: Ask good questions.
Good questions help turn an emotional situation into a factual one. They are particularly powerful in situations with upset customers because they move you toward the customer’s pain in a way that calms the customer down. Most important, it is a necessary next step toward troubleshooting the issue and shifting the discussion to problem solving.
So when are you ready to stop acknowledging someone and start asking good questions? As soon as the heat starts to drop, even a tiny bit. If you have ever been in a situation where you felt you did everything but stand on your head to help a customer who just got angrier, chances are very good that you did not acknowledge that person enough.
What are good questions to ask? Anything that moves you and the customer toward a solution. And what are bad questions to ask? Anything that challenges the customer or sounds insincere. Here are some general guidelines.
Take a Learning Posture
People often feel that their job with difficult customers is to challenge the customers’ perceptions. We ask them questions designed to convince them that they didn’t read our directions, follow our rules, or remember our policies. But to calm people down, you need to turn this objective around 180 degrees and try to learn from them. Here are some examples:
(Customer feels your product stinks.) “Sounds like you had a terrible experience. What kinds of things fell short for you with this product?”
(Customer is furious after waiting on hold for a half hour.) “That is a really long time! How did you get treated once you finally got through? Were we able to take care of the problem?”
(Customer is upset with how she was spoken to.) “I am so glad you are sharing this with me. No one wants to feel talked down to. Would you be comfortable with sharing exactly what our person said that made you feel disrespected?”
Ask them things like how they experienced the situation, what they tried to do first, and what they feel should have happened. You are not judging or agreeing at this stage—just putting yourself in their shoes and gathering information.
Never Ask “Why?”
Questions that begin with “Why” are not really questions: They are confrontations with question marks at the end of them. They never favor the customer and never move you closer to a solution. Never ask upset customers why they did or did not do something; instead, explore how they feel and what they want.
Get Specific
The best questions gather data that move you toward a solution while showing interest in the situation. This means that details are your friend. When did this happen? How long were they waiting? What kinds of things happened when they first tried to get help? The more you know, the better. And the more you can respond appropriately to this information (“Wow, that was a long wait”), better yet.
A more subtle point about good questions is that they put time and space between you and the customer’s anger, allowing both sides to calm down and negotiate a solution. Don’t just ask questions for the sake of asking them—people can see through that. Good questions, however, can be one of the best weapons in your arsenal for defusing a bad situation.
Step 3: Shift the Discussion
Once you have acknowledged someone enough for the heat to drop, and asked good questions to clarify the customer’s position, you can now try to shift the discussion from anger to constructive problem solving.
Here you follow the same process outlined in Chapter 6: Clarify what they want, respond with what you can do rather than what you can’t do, create incentives for accepting your solution, and respond to their objections. Here is an example of how this might play out with a very angry customer, including the earlier steps of acknowledging and asking good questions:
Customer: Tonight was our twenty-fifth anniversary, and this was the most horrible meal we have ever had! The waiter was rude, the food was cold, and it took more than an hour to serve us. We are beyond upset right now.
You: (acknowledgment and good questions) Wow! I can’t believe that so many things went wrong for you on such a special occasion. I feel terrible about this, and I really appreciate your letting me know. Could you tell me what you both ordered?
Customer: I had the porterhouse steak, and my wife had chicken cordon bleu. My steak was practically raw, and her chicken was so cold that the cheese inside wasn’t even melted.
You: That is horrible! I am also concerned about how the waiter treated you. Would you be comfortable sharing what went wrong there?
Customer: You bet. When I confronted him about our dinners, he muttered something about a new cook and disappeared on us. Then when he came back and we asked him to take these dinners off the bill, he had a bad attitude and told us we would have to talk to the manager. So here we are.
You: (assess what they want) It sounds like practically nothing went right here tonight, and on your twenty-fifth anniversary no less. What could we do to make this right for you?
Customer: I’ll be totally honest. This has ruined such an important
special occasion, I am thinking of seeking compensation in small claims court and letting the local newspaper’s food reporter know about this as well. I feel you people should be out of business.
You: (acknowledge and respond with what you can do) If this were my twenty-fifth anniversary, I would be that angry too. You have the right to do whatever you feel you need to do. But since my name is on this restaurant, I would love the chance to try again and give you both the kind of evening you were planning on.
Customer: Well, you didn’t do a very good job this time. Plus I’m probably getting your whole staff in trouble here.
You: (respond to objections and create incentives) Absolutely, we did fall down tonight, and I want to apologize to both of you for that. And of course I am going to talk to our team. Don’t worry, no heads are going to roll, but moments like these help me teach people how to do things the right way. So here is my proposal. Forget tonight’s bill. Pick another date sometime this month, call me personally, and let us try again to create a very special evening for the two of you. It will be on the house, and it will be our pleasure.
Customer: All right, then. We’ll think about it. Thank you for listening to us.
A lot of important things went on in this discussion. First, the customer’s anger was heard and acknowledged. Second, the restaurant owner showed an interest in the specifics of what happened. Third, the owner focused on a solution. But what is just as important is what didn’t happen in this discussion: There were no excuses, and there was no defensiveness or pushback, even when the customer threatened the manager. This manager avoided all of these things precisely because none of it would have worked.
This is the heart and soul of defusing a difficult conflict. Keep your focus on the customer, find the core of reasonableness in the customer’s frustration, and work with the customer to co-create a satisfactory solution. In this case, the manager has probably prevented a court date and lots of bad publicity for the price of a couple of dinners. And in the general case, skills like these will help you walk safely into—and out of—your worst customer service situations.
Your Secret Weapon: The LPFSA
When you are trying to keep someone from becoming upset and you have few options to work with, one tool will often save the day: the LPFSA.
The what?
The LPFSA: the Low Probability Face-Saving Alternative. It is an option you offer the customer that (1) has a low probability of being successful, but (2) addresses the customer’s agenda and allows him or her to save face.
Does this sound disingenuous to you—or to the customer? Not as much as you might think, as long as you frankly inform the customer of its low probability up front.
A perfect example of the LPFSA came up a few years ago when I went to a major league baseball park during a business trip. It was a perfect Sunday afternoon: sunny, 70 degrees, Father’s Day weekend, and the home team was a game out of first place. I did not know it as I pulled into the parking lot, but the game was sold out. Here is what I was told when I went up to the ticket window:
“It’s a beautiful day for baseball, and we would love to see you get into the game today. Even though we are completely sold out, here is what we would like to suggest. Our season ticket holders have a tradition of dropping off extra tickets they aren’t using at the gates, and if we have any, we give these away for free. I can’t make any guarantees, especially this close to game time, but if you don’t mind checking the other gates, it would be great if we could still get you in.”
I checked at each gate: no extra tickets, but everyone was as polite and helpful as the person at the ticket window. Eventually it struck me: I had just spent twenty minutes circumnavigating the ballpark, a distance of several city blocks. I had no ticket to the game. I was walking back to my car. And largely because of how I was treated (and, I found out later, how this team’s employees were trained), I was not feeling the least bit unhappy!
Here are some other examples of an LPFSA in action:
The doctor is booked solid, but you put patients on a list for an earlier appointment if someone cancels.
Someone gets a parking ticket, and you offer the option of appealing it by mail.
You offer to refer a situation to your manager for a decision.
Used properly, the LPFSA gives customers something of value for their efforts—the hope of a possible solution. More important, it allows you to use the language of an ally to calm them down.
Working in the Red Zone
Our natural reaction to a customer’s fury is to become frightened and defensive. I want you to have a different reaction: confidence. When you learn and use skills like these, you can truly defuse angry customer situations with the skill of a bomb squad. This confidence, in turn, will almost always carry over to your customer.
At the same time, know your limits. Communicating well in the face of customer rage takes practice. You should also be aware that the gravity of some situations will overwhelm even your best communications skills. For example, if I were to rush to the hospital after learning my wife was in an accident and was told that I would have to wait for visiting hours, there is nothing anyone could say that would keep me—or most of us—from getting angry. There is no shame in calling for help when you need it.
Chapter 19 examines what to do when situations truly start getting out of hand. It covers important techniques ranging from calling for backup to keeping yourself safe. But with the right skills, most of us need never get to that point. Anger is something you and your entire team can learn from, work with, and master—and when you do, the benefits for you, your customers, and your career are incredible.
PUTTING LEARNING INTO PRACTICE
1. You are a hospital administrator, and a mother is furious about her son’s treatment: the delays, the pain, the lack of communication. How should you respond?
2. One of your home-remodeling clients calls, enraged that your crew accidentally shattered a prized stained glass window at her house. This situation was totally your fault. How do you respond?
3. A woman is very angry about her lawn mower breaking down again. After you have asked a few questions, it is clear to you that she is misusing it on terrain it was never intended for. Nonetheless, she feels the problem is your fault. What do you say?
CHAPTER 9
Becoming Immune
to Intimidation
MUCH OF THIS BOOK is oriented toward working with people who are beyond their boiling point of frustration and helping them feel heard, understood, and negotiated with. But what about abusive customers who use intimidation as a finely honed weapon to get more than they deserve? For example, people who say things like, “Don’t you know who I am?” or, “I’ll talk to your boss if I don’t get what I want.”
In this chapter, we look at how to deal with toxic entitlement, wherein people cross the line from legitimate frustration to bullying and narcissism. In doing so, we explore the effective technique of non-reactivity—a combination of calmness and assertiveness—to maintain boundaries while taking away the emotional satisfaction from someone who tries to intimidate you. In addition, we touch on three important steps to achieving this: accepting a customer’s self-importance, using a tool called fogging to deflect the customer’s criticism, and underreacting to the customer’s threats.
Ultimately, it is not the other person’s words but your reactions to these words that determine the balance of power between you and an intimidator. This, in turn, governs the course and the outcome of these encounters. As with other difficult customer situations, you often have much more control over arrogant and entitled customers than you think.
Angry Customers vs. Toxic Entitlement
Take two difficult customers. Neither is happy. Both are loud, demanding, and rude. Both may be using similar threats, gestures, and foul language. Yet on the inside they are so distinct from each other that they could practically be from different species, and as a result, in order to effectively handle each of them you
need to take different approaches.
What’s the difference between these two individuals? One of these customers is feeling a lot like you or I might when we are unhappy. She feels wronged—and worse, she feels ignored—so she is taking out her frustrations on you. Her approach may be uncomfortable to deal with, but it ultimately springs from authentic feelings.
The other customer is following a script that has served him well for much of his life. He learned at an early age that power and intimidation give him more of what he wants. Many of us would call this person a bully; in this chapter, I use a term that perhaps better describes his psychology: toxic entitlement.
Most of us feel that we are entitled to whatever we deserve. With toxic entitlement, people feel they are entitled to whatever they can win. Their personal belief system does not consider other people’s feelings, their agendas, or even what most people would consider to be fair and reasonable. Such customers are very different from garden-variety difficult customers. One is responding to authentic feelings; the other is gaming the system in a way that is comfortable and familiar for him.
Normal crisis communications skills do not work with these customers. They couldn’t care less whether you acknowledge them or offer them face-saving alternatives; they only care that they win. And if cranking up the heat helps them win more often, so be it.
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