“Our maintenance team will arrive at your house between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. tomorrow. If there are any delays, or if you have any questions, I would like you to call our operations manager. Here is a card with her name and phone number.”
“Given everything you went through, I’m glad we could arrange at least a partial refund for this. Is there anything else we can help you with?”
A good verbal receipt does much more than just clarify your resolution to a problem. It makes you seem engaged, competent, and concerned for the customer. A more subtle point is that verbal receipts can be emotional as well as factual: They represent a good opportunity to thank customers, apologize to them, or express any other authentic feelings that help people feel better. Done well, these summaries substantially increase the odds of ending things on a good note.
Normalize the Situation
At the end of a tough transaction, one of the most powerful things you can do is make the other person feel OK about his or her behavior. Even when—listen carefully—this behavior was less than ideal. Not in a saccharine, it’s-perfectly-all-right-that-you-were-a-jerk kind of way, but rather as a communion of equals: a reaffirmation that normal, healthy people get frustrated and even overinvested in customer situations.
In Chapter 7, we discussed the technique of normalizing a situation, where you validate it as being common for yourself and others. Here are some examples of using it at the end of a transaction:
“I’m glad we were able to work this out. No one likes to go away unhappy.”
“If it were my child, I would have stood up for her interests, too.”
“No one wants to pay more than they have to, especially in this economy.”
Some of you may wonder why you should bother to spare the feelings of difficult customers, especially after you have resolved their situation. There are several important reasons why you should at least consider this:
It brings the transaction to a close quickly and peacefully.
It removes the need for difficult customers to defend themselves.
It makes them less likely to complain later about the situation—or about you personally.
It reduces the likelihood they will come back seeking more.
It may preserve their future business.
Above all, people worry that making difficult customers feel better somehow justifies their behavior and perpetuates their being difficult in the future. In reality, the opposite is usually true. Criticizing bad behavior leads people to harden their positions and defend themselves, while respect leads them to be more open to your way of thinking. By making customers feel better about what happened, you help flip their perspective in your favor and usually make them easier to deal with next time.
Reaffirm the Customer Relationship
No matter how nice you might be to a challenging customer, she probably has one remaining concern: that you have her pegged forever after as “that customer” who made your life difficult.
Why should you care about this? Because you often have a chance here to turn a crisis into a profitable opportunity. Many people who lose it in front of customer service professionals are too embarrassed to ever come back again. If you can turn around this feeling and make them feel truly welcome to come back, you have an opportunity to gain both their cooperation and their future business.
Since a customer cannot read your mind, the most powerful signal you can send that the situation is OK is to reaffirm the future of the relationship. Here are some sample statements you could use to do this:
“If you come back next month, we plan to have some of these items on sale.”
“I’m glad we could work this out. It would be great to have you come back and try us again in the future.”
“Next time you are here, feel free to ask for me personally.”
So what if your honest feelings about this customer are more like, “Please don’t go away angry—just go away”? Follow your gut. If your personal radar tells you that a customer is chronically unreasonable, abusive, or threatening, there is no need to invite that person back. But most difficult situations are, at root, moments of humanity that are caused when people do not get what they want. Smooth over these situations, and you can often gain a lasting customer relationship.
Thanking Your Difficult Customers
Small-business owners sometimes wonder how to react after a client has made their lives difficult. How about thanking them?
Business consultant Karlene Sinclair-Robinson found this approach to be successful with one of her clients: “In one case, I went a step further by not just acknowledging the problem, but sending the client a handwritten ‘Thank You’ card for their patience, and for allowing me the opportunity to work on solving their problem.” She noted that her gesture made their working relationship much easier from there: “In the end, the card concept won them over and we were able to change the outcome to their benefit, even with the changes they had to make.”
Thanking people can be a powerful reaffirmation of their worth as customers. More important, it frames any difficulties you may have had in the context of a productive future relationship. And in Sinclair-Robinson’s case, the personal touch of a handwritten note got this client’s attention in a very productive way.
The Right Ending: A Good Beginning
The importance of a good closing often goes far beyond the individual transaction. In a very real sense, the way you wrap things up with customers can turn into part of your brand with the public. It becomes a component of your culture and affects how others perceive you.
When I managed high-volume customer-contact operations, I put a great deal of emphasis on how we finished up with customers. In fact, I considered the way we closed a transaction to be every bit as important as the way we opened it, because final impressions often matter every bit as much as first impressions. It is a strategic tool that dovetails with your overall style with customers.
When customer situations get out of hand, good closings become even more important. Knowing how to wrap up a difficult situation does not just send customers away happier—it builds your own confidence for the future. More important, these skills can become part of a broader approach for managing the life cycle of every customer transaction.
PUTTING LEARNING INTO PRACTICE
1. A customer angrily demanded a refund for a product after going on at great length about how horrible it was. She didn’t realize that you would be more than happy to give her a refund, and now she looks a little embarrassed about her behavior. What do you say?
2. Someone calls your appliance service company and is extremely upset that no one showed up as scheduled the day before to make a repair. After rescheduling the appointment, what do you say before hanging up?
3. A woman purchased several expensive pieces of equipment at your hardware store and was very picky and demanding about everything. You sense that she was getting exasperated with you as she kept pressing you with more questions. What might you say at the end of the transaction to help preserve her future business?
PART III
Your Worst
Customer
Situations—
Solved!
CHAPTER 11
You’re the Boss
YOU ARE THE MANAGER of a busy public golf course in the suburbs of a major city. You just came into work, and you can tell already that it is not going to be a good morning. Why? Because a middle-aged man in golfing clothes has just burst through the front door looking enraged . . . and carrying a steering wheel in his hand.
He storms up to the counter, brushing past the people in line, and demands in a loud tone of voice to see the manager. You rush over and introduce yourself. He ignores your outstretched handshake, waving the steering wheel at you as he exclaims, “See this? Your stupid golf cart almost killed me and my family out there! My daughter has just been taken to the hospital with cuts all over!”
This is the kind of situation that customer service professio
nals often dread the most. It potentially has serious consequences: At least one person has been injured, and there is a real possibility of litigation. And wherever the fault of this situation ultimately lies, the customer is likely to blame you. (People don’t usually tear steering wheels off of golf carts in the course of normal driving.)
What do you say in response to this person? And then how do you guide the rest of the transaction from there? In this chapter, we offer some guidelines based on the techniques discussed in the previous chapters.
Lean Into the Customer’s Biggest Concerns
The customer in the previous example has just given you a critical piece of information that must jump to the top of your priority list: His daughter has been taken to the hospital, and his family was involved in an accident. Everything else is secondary at this moment. This means there is only one appropriate initial response: Lean into these concerns and proactively acknowledge them, as discussed in Chapter 2. Here is an example:
“That’s terrible! How is your daughter doing? Are you injured? And how is everyone else?”
If you have ever reported an accident to the police or to your insurance company, you may recall that these transactions always start by asking how everyone is. The reason: It expresses concern for what is most important for anyone in this situation.
At this point, it is critical to give this customer whatever time and space he needs to tell his story. Use what psychologists call minimal encourages (“I see . . . sure . . . absolutely”) to let him know that you are paying close attention to what he is telling you. Otherwise, stay out of his way until he has said whatever he feels the need to say, with as little “editing” as possible.
You might feel uncomfortable at this stage of the conversation because you have no idea how the other person is going to respond to what you say. He may calm down and reply to your questions, or he may continue to lash out at you. His words might drip with anger and sarcasm. He could even threaten you with things like legal action.
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter what he says. Because you will do exactly the same thing in response: Lean into that response with gusto. For example:
Him: We could have all been killed out there!
You: Absolutely! Losing control of a golf cart can be really dangerous! That must have been incredibly frightening. Thank goodness no one was killed!
Him: I’ll bet you were pinching pennies and skimped on maintaining these golf carts.
You: No one should ever have a mechanical failure like this happen to them.
Him: You’re going to pay for this!
You: If this were my daughter, I would be reacting exactly the same way.
Note that in each of these responses, you are neither defending yourself nor contesting the other person’s assertions. Your goal here is to respond to each thing this customer says in such a way that he is nodding his head to whatever you say. This means you are reflecting his reality and his emotions in a way that shows him that you get it.
Ask Good Questions
Once this person tells his story, and in all likelihood continues to vent his frustrations, you really have only one lever you can pull to try to calm him down, as discussed in Chapter 8: Ask good questions.
In the thirty seconds after you start speaking, the other person will decide whether you are with him or against him. What you say in those thirty seconds often decides whether he will ramp up or ramp down his anger. By asking questions that draw out the details of the situation, you align yourself as being on his side and start calming him down. For example:
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“Did you notice anything different about the golf cart before the accident happened?”
“Are you and the rest of your family members able to walk around OK right now?”
By getting this person to open up about the details, you ground his anger by focusing him on the present moment. More important, you show him you are interested in the details of what happened as he sees it.
Asking the Right Questions
In a contentious situation like this, the right questions do not just serve to calm the other person down—they can also shed light on the facts of the case. For example, if this person drove your golf cart into a ditch after having a few beers, this may be a very different legal scenario than if the steering wheel simply fell off. Ask good questions, and take good notes!
Once you have established the details of the situation, your next priority should be to ask questions about his welfare and that of his family:
“Is there anything I can do for you right now?”
“Do you need to get in contact with anyone?”
“How is the rest of your family doing right now? Is there anything they need?”
Often, showing a genuine concern for everyone’s welfare represents a turning point in discussions like these. Questions like those above are not only courteous, but they serve a valuable function in the dialogue, shifting its focus from recrimination to next steps. As long as they are sincere and appropriate, these questions stand a very good chance of starting to calm the other person down.
One final note on information-gathering questions: They will only work if they are designed to hear the customer, not to challenge him. He is already in the red zone, and whether he is in the right or in the wrong, you cannot successfully explore whether he was reckless, distracted, drinking, and the like—at least not at this moment—through direct questions. Such questions have a 100 percent probability of generating heat rather than light. Your best and perhaps only chance of getting to the real truth is to create a comfort zone that may breed more honesty.
Respond to Threats with “Can-Do” Language
When something really bad happens, many of us make a critical mistake: We try in vain to make the problem go away right now. In other words, we try to defend ourselves, respond equivocally, or even blame the other person, in hopes of somehow convincing him that this is not our fault. Of course, this strategy always fails miserably.
A far better approach is to accept reality and presume that the other person is going to challenge and threaten us, and then respond in a way that speaks to his interests. This is not the same as admitting fault: You probably do not have enough information at this point to do that, even if you wanted to. Rather, you focus on what you can do, as described in Chapter 6, and lead with that in each of your responses:
Him: I plan to launch an investigation of this incident!
You: Of course. We both want to find out what happened here. I am going to insist on that as well.
Him: You’ll be hearing from my lawyer about this!
You: I will be happy to cooperate fully with your lawyer. I’ll give you the name of our counsel.
Him: You are going to have to pay for our daughter’s medical expenses!
You: We will work with you to do whatever is fair for both of us.
Note carefully that in each of these exchanges, you are not admitting liability or agreeing to compensation—yet. You simply do not know enough at this stage to make such judgments. Ultimately, the liability for this may rest with you, the golf cart manufacturer—or even the person in front of you.
At the same time, in your responses you are studiously avoiding the use of negative expectation to challenge or threaten this individual. Statements such as, “We’ll have to see what our policy is” or, worse, “We need to make sure this wasn’t your fault,” serve no purpose at this juncture. Save them for the courtroom, if needed. Right now, your job is to choose words that de-escalate the situation, build trust, and move both of you toward the likely next steps in the process: police reports, insurance claims, legal consultations, and the like.
The Law of Reciprocity
In situations like these, there is an additional step you can take, one based on what is known as the “law of reciprocity”: If you do someone an unsolicited favor, most people feel obliged to return the favor.
In the previous situation,
where tempers are frayed, emotions are running high, and a daughter needs medical treatment, there is likely to be follow-up. What this customer thinks of you at the end of the transaction may have a bearing on whether he negotiates in good faith or decides to “sue the bastards” (e.g., you!). Therefore, you might consider whether an appropriate gesture might change the dynamics of the transaction.
For example, do people need rides to the hospital? Do they need a meal that you can cover as a gracious gesture? If they are from out of town, do they need lodging? You are not obligated to make gestures like these. If there is still too much tension or hostility, they may even seem patronizing or, worse, an attempt to buy them off. However, if your communications skills are working as they should, consider whether you can offer something appropriate. This could be a case where a $95 motel bill might forestall a $50,000 lawsuit.
However you handle the situation, the key is to consistently be honest and genuine, and speak to the interests of the other person. With the right words, and the right mindset, you have a very good chance of resolving situations like these in such a way that everyone wins.
CHAPTER 12
Don’t You Know
Who I Am?
YOU PICK UP THE PHONE WITH A POLITE, “Front desk. May I help you?” The woman’s shrill voice at the other end of the line almost knocks you flat: “How dare you!”
The Customer Service Survival Kit Page 11
