Your Source for Providing a Better Customer Service and Customer Support Experience

Do you find difficult customers hard to deal with? Welcome to a very large club, but a club that I would like you to leave. You see, to me, the question of what to say to a porcupine – in other words, how to respond to your most challenging customers – isn’t a matter of luck or even attitude, but rather of technique.

Let’s take a very common example. You probably wake up every morning thinking, correctly, that you are a nice person. But then you come to work and take a call from someone who sounds a little frustrated with a computer problem. You say, “I understand, sir,” and he gets even more upset. Then he makes an unreasonable demand, and you try to tell him very politely that what he wants isn’t possible. He then starts going ballistic and demanding to speak to a supervisor, at which point you escalate him with obvious relief.

You may think that you were done in by a difficult customer, but I disagree. You were done in by linguistics.

In this and subsequent blog entries, I am going to discuss the mechanics of what to say for the four most common “stuck points” in a difficult customer transaction: how to connect with someone in the first 30 seconds, how to deliver bad news, how to avoid simply saying “no” to people, and how to defuse someone’s anger. All of these issues involve specific (and in some cases, fairly recent) techniques taken from modern behavioral psychology, and as a former help desk executive and veteran of 25,000 support calls, I can also say that they work extremely well.
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Probably in one way or another, we’ve all been affected by the growing numbers of layoffs and overall concern over job security, even for those in seemingly ‘secure’ positions. This week I took a look at Jobfox, (www.jobfox.com) who describes itself as the Internet’s “fastest growing job site in America.” Their angle is somewhat different from other job sites – they connect working professionals with corporate recruiters using what they call a “mutual suitability system” to match up prospective employees and employers. With a big surge of new prospects, (daily hits on the Jobfox website reportedly surpass one million) and ten sales and support offices across the U.S., keeping up with the number of customer service requests became a big challenge. It was clear they’d outgrown their manual ticket-tracking approach, and needed a self service application that would let job seekers find answers to their questions themselves, fast. Jobfox’s customer service manager turned to on-demand software and was able to implement the customer service software inside a month. Job seekers (many are online after hours and on weekends) need their questions answered quickly. A customer support portal is good for job seekers who need a 24/7 knowledgebase, and good for Jobfox who can now speed their response time to requests that do require more help. (I found more than 60 knowledgebase articles, including one that explained what the little bulls eye means next to a job listing.) It’s a win-win: fewer customer service tickets, and the rising number of job seekers using Jobfox find what they need easier and faster.
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One thing I know for sure about folks in the customer service and support community. They love to connect, share ideas, help each other out wherever and whenever they can. That’s really not surprising, since customer service professionals are in the business of maintaining and growing valuable, sustainable customer relationships every day.

That’s the idea behind our new blog site. We’ll share best practices. Talk about what’s working and what’s not. We’ll take on hot button topics like techniques for dealing with difficult customers, how to improve customer service and cut costs in a downturn, how to ramp up your customer satisfaction numbers.
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