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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