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

The webinar “Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions for Rich G. during and prior to the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Rich was unable to answer all of those great questions; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each and every one which we are posting in a two part series here.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that Rich’s answers to these questions may also help you turn your challenging customer situations into positive customer experiences.

Congratulations to Rick Bruce, Jason Lorenz and L. Graves who submitted the winning stories for a copy of Rich Gallagher’s latest book “How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work.”

If you did not attend the webinar, we invite you to watch it now. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here.

Winning Stories

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 receiver 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.

I just had to choose this one, because my first computer was a Kaypro! You would need to have the right personality to pull off what this agent “Tom” did, acting like an interruption was more important than the customer. But he used some very sound psychology in asking good questions that got the user to respond factually and not emotionally. Anyone can learn and practice asking good questions in a tense situation – just like police officers and hostage negotiators do – without the need for subterfuge. Questions ground people and get them to calm down.
-Rich

On our Help Desk we recently had a customer alternate between screaming and crying because he could not remember the fourteen passwords he needed to log into all of his different applications. He would scream, apologize because 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 difficult call for the Technician attempting to assist the customer because of the customer’s emotional state. At the time we pulled the voiceprint of the call and asked our client’s home office to address this issue, but 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 most people are confronted with an inappropriately emotional customer, we tend to “shut down” and respond procedurally and robotically – which makes these people even angrier! (Reversing roles for a minute, this is also why you shouldn’t lose your cool at an airline ticket counter when your flight gets cancelled – see my recent blog http://point-of-contact.blogspot.com/2010/02/theory-of-relativity.html) This situation calls for lots of validation, acknowledgment, and assessment questions on how this impacts the upset customers.
  -Rich

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.

My late father was a professor and later a university president, so I can relate to this one! Never ever accuse a customer of wrongdoing directly. Boil the situation down into facts and work from the facts – “this keyboard is sticky and there are lots of games loaded on here” is OK, “I don’t believe you, you must have children using this computer” is not. I will discuss tomorrow that even when customers lie, you shouldn’t “catch” them at it – here’s another blog I wrote on that: http://point-of-contact.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html.
 -Rich

Q&A Part 1

How would you respond to a customer who consistently and “aggressively” questions your ability and problem solving tactics?

Build their confidence by using a technique I call “playback” – take their agenda and proactively chain it to your response. “Because you need this resolved quickly, here is why I am choosing this diagnostic approach.”
-Rich

How to turn around to the positive, dealing with customers reluctant to change to new technology/software?

Resist all temptation to tell these people how much better the new technology is, at first – acknowledge their complaints that change is frustrating. (I am an alpha geek, for example, but still get frustrated when Facebook seemingly changes its interface every two weeks.) Then ask good questions about how they use the product. *Then*, and only then, sell the benefits of the new approach.
-Rich

How do you get them to use the help desk services instead of phoning or emailing you directly and copying upper management?

Give them a benefit for doing this, and communicate this benefit to the customer. (“Our help desk responds to most open cases within 24 hours, and is more responsive than contacting specific individuals who may or may not be available to work on your issue.”) And if you *can’t* say something like this with a straight face, examine why customers get better service by jumping the line, and address this strategically.
-Rich

Please address the cost of doing bad business and how to position this with Sales organizations.

Great question – my answers could easily fill an entire book! Here is my two cents: in my own management career, “turning around” the service performance of call centers has led to dramatic results – in one case, growing from a startup to a NASDAQ firm, in another, growing sales 25% in a recession. That’s why I’m so passionate about this topic.
-Rich

I have a customer from Australia who complains every time on conference calls about the same topic. Doesn’t matter that we already tried our best to respond numerous times – the customer just can’t let go of the issue, and keeps bringing it back every time.

How do you deal with a customer who is being completely uncooperative and illogical even when you provide various other options to them?

I will answer these both together. When you feel you are quote-unquote “trying your best” and the other person keeps getting angrier, It is highly likely that you are not acknowledging the customer, just providing “solutions” – just like when your mother wouldn’t let you do something and asked if you could just play with your sister instead. Try using phrases like, “I can see why you want to do X. I agree, that would be a lot easier for you. I wish your service plan allowed X. Here are some alternatives …”
-Rich

If two different persons in your customer’s organization have different perceptions of an issue affecting your product and both are correct in their own way. How do you direct both persons to a conclusion that will benefit all parties without having a fight?

This is actually the classic problem of marriage and family therapy, and MFTs use an approach called “multidirected partiality”: speak from the voice of each person, and frame their concerns in a way that puts them both in a reasonable light. (“Arnie, you are trying to preserve your department’s budget, which makes perfect sense – and Sally, of course you are trying to limit defections of our paying customers as much as you can. Let’s break down both of these arguments and see where we can go with them.”) I’ve seen this approach work wonders in both workplace and clinical situations.
-Rich

How do you deal with customers who completely disagree with the service of the website, yet still pay to use it, and do their best to change it based on what they think is best, and takes their aggression into social media?

Welcome to the world of freedom of speech! I’ve actually studied social media responses to corporations as part of a client project, and discovered an interesting fact: when most people like your company, people who complain in social media tend to get tuned out. (And, of course, if people hate your company, these complaints can turn into a feeding frenzy.) From a communications standpoint, acknowledge the complainant’s concerns, and frame your response in terms of how it benefits all your customers.
-Rich

One of our biggest challenges is customers who don’t understand our product, don’t actively engage in the many training opportunities that we offer, and yet become frustrated and sometimes angry when the system doesn’t behave as they expect. 

Been there, done that. Resist the temptation to frame these discussions as “you should have gotten training” – frame them as “here is how we can help you be more productive with our product.” And keep learning from your customers about how to make your products even more intuitive in the future.
-Rich

Is responding via email a better way to respond to a “problem” customer, in order to have a paper trail?

Only if you are in a situation requiring legal documentation. The personal touch is always better. As an aside, I’ve analyzed “paper trails” that training clients give me about their worst customers, and the same communications skills still apply – acknowledgement and benefits calm people down, while limits and “policy” agitate them.
-Rich

I meet with clients who are required by the county to meet with me, have ongoing appts, go to required classes and if they don’t I can sanction (take away) a portion of county assistance until they comply-any thoughts?

Great scenario, similar to what psychotherapists refer to as “mandated clients” who are in court-ordered therapy and don’t want to be there. There is a growing literature base on handling mandated clients, and much of it corroborates my own advice to speak from the client’s perspective rather than yours: “I realize you may not like this process. What can we do to make this easier for you? Since you are here anyway, are there things we could work together on that might benefit you?” And be sure to acknowledge every complaint from the client, which is not the same as agreeing with them.
-Rich

Customers who have preconceived notions about calling and getting someone with an Indian accent on the phone.

I have trained call centers in India before. Often the problem is less one of accent and more one of culture – offshore call centers often use less acknowledgment, and more formal scripted responses, than North Americans are used to. When agents learn to communicate well, they often sound indistinguishable from their domestic counterparts, accent or no.
-Rich

How to satisfy a customer and adhere to company policies and procedures at the same time?

Always focus on what you can do, not what you can’t do. (Compare “you’ll have to fill out a form for this” to “let me walk you through how we can get this fixed for you” and see what I mean – examine and workshop the language you use with customers and ruthlessly cut out “can’t,” “you’ll have to,” “we don’t”, etc. out of the dialogue). Acknowledge legitimate frustrations and use transitional phrases like “I wish” and “even though” to shift the focus back to solutions. Finally, if too many policies upset too many customers, leverage your support team as the voice of the customer.
-Rich

What’s the best way to calm down an upset customer?

Check out my Parature blog series from last year on “What to Say to a Porcupine”: I’m all over this situation. Short form answer: acknowledgement (using “identification” where at all possible), good questions to drain the heat from the transaction, and negotiating solutions from a stance of what you *can* do.
-Rich

If you’re on a call and the customer makes racist comment not knowing your race, how do you respond to that?

Racism (or sexism, or xenophobia) is behavior that crosses acceptable boundaries. I have no problem whatsoever with setting boundaries and/or terminating the call in situations like this.
-Rich

What is your recommended best practice for delivering bad news?

I have a technique called “staging” designed just for that situation. Check earlier Parature blog entries from my “What to say to a Porcupine” webinar – or my books – for more details.
-Rich