Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support
Customer Service Experience, Webinars 9 Comments
Webinar: Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You
Most customer support teams are good at handling routine transactions. But what about a customer who is threatening to sue you? Or asks to have you fired? Or an employee who got so fed up with IT support that he smashed his laptop and then ran over it?
All of these are real situations that support professionals reported in a recent survey sponsored by Supportindustry.com and Parature. This interactive webinar, teaming communications skills expert and bestselling author Rich Gallagher with Parature’s VP of Marketing Gary McNeil, looks at how to handle situations like these and more. The open panel discussion format will examine the best practices, tools and technology behind handling your worst-case scenarios.
Congratulations to Rick Bruce, Jason Lorenz, and L Graves, winners of Rich Gallagher’s latest book “How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work”.
If you missed the webinar, the recorded version is available here. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here.
A copy of this presentation is available in our SlideShare profile.
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One of my favorite “angry customer” stories took place in the early 1980’s when I was a phone support rep for Kaypro corporation. As it happens, one of my fellow support reps was taking a call from a guy who was just yelling. Tom was a very mellow (seriously mellow) fellow. Eschewing the earpieces that most of us wore, he used the phone at work the way he used his phone at home. So he simply held the reciever away from his ear as this fellow kept yelling for at least ten to fifteen minutes. At the end of the tirade, after a few moments of silence, Tom put the phone to his ear and said “I’m sorry Bob, someone came up to my desk. Can you please repeat that.” Bob did, indeed repeat the salient details of his case, but he had burnt out whatever fueled his anger and was able to let Tom help him. I don’t think I’d ever use Tom’s technique, but I did learn that sometimes people want to be helped, and sometimes they just want to vent their anger.
It was the official launch date for a client, and they were missing some crucial resources. The resources were located out of state at one of their sister companies. The client was so frustrated they called us up and claimed that they were going to have a stroke if this couldn’t be fixed in time!
On our Help Desk we recently had customer alternate between screaming and crying becasue he could not remember the fourteen passowrds he needed to log into all of his different applications. He would scream, apologize becasue he knew we had no control over it, and then start to cry before screaming again when the next error message happened. It was an extremely diffuclt call for the Technician attempting to assist the customer becasue of the customer’s hold emotional state. At the time we pulled the voiceprint of the call and ask our client’s home office to address this issue, btu I wonder now if there would have been a better way to handle that call with the customer and prevented incident or even won the customer over?
When I asked a customer how I could assist, he angrily replied, “I don’t know what my problem is and I don’t how to fix it but you are going to fix my problem by doing exactly what I tell you to do.” All attempts to obtain a problem clarification failed as the customer repeatedly demanded I do what he told me to do.
We had a high-end product that was used almost exclusively by high-tech professionals. When issues would arise we would often need to take the customer through the basics to ensure we didn’t miss something obvious like a loose cable or a software configuration. The more the customer knew about the technology the more difficult it was to get their assistance through that early troubleshooting because they would feel they could easily solve those issues themselves. On one occasion I was confident the issue was due to a loose cable that connected two pieces of our hardware. Historically when we were faced with similar situations the customers would initially reject a plan to reseat the cable because they felt they would have discovered such a simple resolution on their own without the need for phone support. On this particular day the customer was well known as a difficult “know-it-all” who always questioned every troubleshooting step we took. knowing the battle I faced I decided not to ask him to reseat the cable but instead told him that the cable, which had two identical ends, was probably reversed and causing the issue. Without a thought he agreed to swap the ends, effectively reseating the cable and resolving the issue. Instead of a long drawn out battle I quickly solved the problem and was highly praised by the happy customer!
I work at a university and the professors can be very high maintenance. One in particular has been a real problem. The professor has a university owned computer and allows their children to install games and play online. This usually ends in a severely infected computer even with all the virus and spyware applications in place. The professor has brought the computer to the Help Desk for help and denied that their children used the computer and they had no idea how the software games were installed. The laptop keyboard was dirty and sticky to touch and it appeared that the computer was only used by children. We tried to gracefully talk to the professor about the condition of the computer and their responsibility for its condition and they burst into tears in front of several Help Desk staff members and started to yell at all of us about their life and how bad it is and that they were going through a divorce and we should not be talking to them like this.
As the professor got louder I got quieter to try and defuse the situation. I empathized with them and tried to be compassionate and understanding. This seemed to work and the professors calmed down and responded a little more reasonably.
My staff now cringes when this professor’s name is displayed on the help desk phones
Delicacy and discretion are required in some user interactions. I remember getting a nice letter sent to the president of our company (which made computers) along with some sample floppy disks (that’s how long ago this was) with the polite complaint that his computer was rendering his disks unreadable.
When we took a look at the disks we were able to read them without a problem. We found an earlier version of the polite letter saved under a very impolite name. We also found that he was the editor of a newsletter for a very explicit special interest adult club.
We had to draw straws to see who was going to call our friend and assure him that the Chicago Area Men’s Hellfire club newsletters were safe and sound and very readable.
A client called our customer care center to report a service issue, and after she disconnected with our representative, she promptly called back and asked to speak with a supervisor. The client was convinced that our representative had been taunting her because of her accent and as a result felt incredibly insulted. After letting the client vent, I apologized for her negative experience and let her know that it would be unacceptable for anyone on our team to treat a client with anything but respect. I asked a few more questions about her request, and was able to quickly resolve the initial concern that had prompted her to call customer care in the first place. She was very thankful, and said that after speaking with me she felt a lot better about our company again. Knowing the representative and the quality of her work very well (she is highly regarded for her firendliness and politeness), I knew that she had not intended to insult or taunt the caller. A review of the call did in fact indicate that our representative was having a difficult time understanding what the client was trying to request, and in her own embarrasment was trying to make fun of herself but instead caused the impression with the client that she was making fun of her. I knew this representative’s positive track record, but for the customer perception is everything, so there would have been no point dwelling with the customer on their perception of the transaction. In this case a sincere apology, a statement of our standards, a promise to follow up with the representaive, and a genuine effort to get her initial concerns resolved went a long way. Reviewing with the rep what she could have done differently has also helped her in how she now deals with callers who use English as a second language.