True Questions from the Front Lines of Customer Support and the Answers from Rich Gallagher

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. Read first part 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.

Q&A Part 2

We provide technical support via the phone. I would love to hear about handling difficult customers on the phone as customers on the phone seem more hostile than in person.

Our members often use quite derogatory language about us personally. Please discuss best practices for lower level staff to help deal with these situations.

How do you handle customers who are having a bad day that just need someone to yell at?

How do I handle customers who are just mean and nasty?

I am going to answer all of these very common scenarios as a group. First, use the best acknowledgements you possibly can, including paraphrasing their concerns. When customers get meaner and nastier over the life cycle of a transaction, you usually aren’t acknowledging them effectively, which triggers more pressure. That said, I have no problem whatsoever with setting boundaries when customers cross the line from upset to abusive – consider phrases such as “I would like to help you, but you will need to stop screaming at me.”
-Rich

As a non-profit organization that signs up people for monthly donations, we occasionally receive calls from donors that were not aware they were donating more than one-time.  How do you recommend handling such situations i.e. refunds, retention, etc.?

Very good question. No communications skills can absolve people from acting on the moral high ground. When someone felt they were making a one-time donation, the only proper response is to apologize and, if needed, return the unexpected donation. And if this happens often, review your procedures to examine why people misunderstand your process.
-Rich

What about the frustrated customer who wants to “jump” to a supervisor?

I am generally in favor of escalation on demand – particularly when you use your systems (like Parature) to analyze why calls need to escalate, and respond strategically. Incidentally, I am also in favor of talented peers serving as a path of escalation where appropriate, particularly where the issue is expertise rather than managerial authority.
-Rich

We offer a free service that we actually pay them money for at the end.  People say they have to think about it.  How do you break through that barrier?

Think like your customer – or better yet, ask them. What is making them skeptical? Is there a trust issue? Is the reward worth their effort? Do they need what you are offering? Then keep workshopping your pitch until it addresses these issues.
-Rich

In higher Ed we deal with PHD’s who feel they are entitled to service from only someone they consider their equal, but they are basically computer knowledge low.  They talk down to you – how do we respond getting them to buy into the fact we can help them?

I know exactly the dynamic you are talking about, Dennis -  I grew up in an academic family and began my career on a campus help desk. (My late father, a university president, often cited Henry Kissinger’s quote that “academic politics are the nastiest, because the stakes are so low.”)

You need to establish credibility with these people, and you can do this by (a) doing a good job of articulately paraphrasing (*not* parroting) their concerns, (b) giving very detailed responses, and (c) summarizing the action items at the end of the transaction. Each of these techniques make you pro-active rather than reactive, and help you establish an equal business posture. And finally, bite your lip and acknowledge Dr. Wonderful’s expertise wherever appropriate.
-Rich

How do you suggest that we educate customers who “just want someone to answer the phone and solve their problem in real time” when we really don’t have the bandwidth for that model?

Here is a phrase I’ve often used: “We want you to have a good experience using our software – and in particular, we want you to have a better experience than we can give you pushing information at you one word at a time over the telephone. So we have some great training (or resources, or consulting, etc.) options for you.”
-Rich

What about handling “internal” customers, working for the same company; same rules?

Yes, but with one big difference. You work with internal customers every day, so your focus must shift from managing a transaction to building a relationship. For example, instead of just defusing a conflict, you want to go further and explore what will make this person happy in the future. Good question on an important topic, I actually devoted a whole chapter to this in my book Great Customer Connections.
-Rich

How do I effectively deal with members who resent a change in our program? Basically, we promised a service forever and now have changed it so it is only guaranteed for one-year at a time.

How can I satisfy those members who wish for the member benefits to always remain the same (but staff, board members, and membership majority) decided to change the benefits?

I’ll answer both of these common issues together. First, lean into their complaints and acknowledge them – “Yes, that was a good benefit package. And I appreciate your taking the step of letting us know how important that was for you.” Second, frame the change in a way that benefits the customer – “We made this change in hopes of holding prices constant for people, while keeping our most popular benefits.” Third, take a learning posture – “I am glad you called, because if enough people still want to keep the benefits they had, that is important feedback for us.”
-Rich

How do you tell a customer that the EFT/WIRE was not submitted on time and that there will be a delay in processing funds transfer?

Lean into the customer’s frustration – openly acknowledge how this is affecting the customer, every time they open their mouth – and then focus on the solution.
-Rich

“Continue as needed to control the conversation”???? Wow–that feels like the opposite of a great customer experience. How do you build a relationship when you see customers are something that need to be controlled? Do you want the talker to “feel” like you are paying attention….or do you pay attention? Big difference…

Good point Molly. In my experience, customers come away much *happier* when you use the “acknowledging close” technique to move the conversation along, because you are engaging them – versus what most people do, which is sit there going “uh-huh” endlessly when overly-talkative customers ramble on and on. This is actually one of the more consistently successful techniques I use in making customers feel good.

Finally, to answer what I sense is the question behind your question – I agree with you, no communications techniques will compensate for a genuine lack of empathy for the customer. In this case, of course you want to both pay attention AND make it clear to the customer that you are doing so – that was the point of that bullet item.
-Rich

I think that the most important thing is have empathy with all the customers.

Yes!! And the second most important thing is to use the right language so that customers feel that empathy.
-Rich

My favorite bit of advice is to ALWAYS remember the customer is complaining TO you, not ABOUT you.

Absolutely Mellissa. You are using a powerful technique from psychology here called “reframing.” When I was a young support rep, I used to think of myself as a psychologist studying the tribal behavior of early computer users, not just someone who was being yelled at.
-Rich

What was that third acknowledgement? Observation, validation and ?

Identification. Observation is where you observe the other person’s response (“I can tell you are pretty upset about this”), validation means letting someone know their feelings are valid (“No one likes to wait for a service call”), and identification means sharing your own feelings (“I wouldn’t like that either.”)
-Rich

Finally, to give credit where credit is due, many of the original issues we discussed in the webinar are documented in SupportIndustry.com and Parature’s 2009 Service & Support Metrics Survey.

Thanks everyone for a great webinar!
Rich

True Questions from the Front Lines of Customer Support and the Answers from Rich Gallagher

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

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. 

"Best Practices in Customer Service" Webinar Series

Delivered by the industry’s leading minds, this thought leadership series is designed to serve as a valuable resource to provide insight into customer service best practices and industry trends. The webinars in this series are ‘must attend’ events for any organization committed to improving the customer experience. We invite you to register for one or register for all depending on the topics that interest you.

Customer service industry experts, Robert Spector – bestselling author, Rich Gallagher of Point of Contact Group, Paige Newcombe of Coremetrics, John Ragsdale of Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), Dr. Natalie Petouhoff of Forrester Research, Jay Topper of Rosetta Stone, Sahar Hashemi of Coffee Republic, Lorraine Grubbs-West of Lessons in Loyalty and Southwest Airlines, and Lisa Ford – customer service expert will focus on current industry technologies, best practices and trends that are key for organizations to improve their support processes to improve the customer experience.

The Best Practices in Customer Service webinar series:

The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence
Date: January 20, 2010 - 2:00pm EST
Presenter: Robert Spector - Bestselling Author of The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence
View Presentation

Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support
Date: February 24, 2010 - 2:00pm EST
Presenter: Rich Gallagher - Bestselling Author and Communications Skills Expert
Register Now

Metrics that Wow! How Coremetrics Became the Customer Service Model of Success
Date: March 30, 2010 - 2:00pm EDT
Presenters: John Ragsdale - Vice President of Technology Research, TSIA and Paige Newcombe - Senior Director, Global Client Services, Coremetrics
Register Now

Why the Customer Experience Matters Most – Rosetta Stone’s Customer Success Strategy
Date: April 21, 2010 - 2:00pm EDT
Presenters: Dr. Natalie Petouhoff - Senior Analyst, Forrester Research and Jay Topper - Vice President of Customer Success, Rosetta Stone
Register Now

In the Customers’ Shoes: How Coffee Republic Built its Brand through Great Customer Experiences (UK Audience)
Date: April 28, 2010 - 9:00am EDT/2:00pm BST
Presenter: Sahar Hashemi - Co-founder, Coffee Republic
Register Now

How to Build a Culture of Customer Loyalty – How Southwest Airlines Does It
Date: May 19, 2010 - 2:00pm EDT
Presenter: Lorraine Grubbs-West - President of Lessons in Loyalty and former Director of Employment at Southwest Airlines
Register Now

Why Customer Service is NOT Enough
Date: June 22, 2010 - 2:00pm EDT
Presenter: Lisa Ford - Creator of How to Give Exceptional Customer Service and author of Exceptional Customer Service - Going Beyond Good Service to Exceed the Customer’s Expectations
Register Now

Parature’s “Best Practices in Customer Service” webinar series is designed to serve as an educational and informational resource for organizations throughout numerous industry sectors to gain insight into customer service best practices and to improve the customer experience.

Watch the webinar "The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence"

“The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence” webinar offers organizations insight into the inner workings of the Nordstrom customer service culture.

Outstanding customer service – the key to successful organizations, a competitive differentiator and a facilitator of customer loyalty – is synonymous with one of the nation’s leading fashion specialty retailers. Nordstrom, known for providing the ultimate customer service experience, has become the national standard for customer service. How did they earn this reputation? What is their philosophy? The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence will feature Robert Spector, bestselling author of The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence. Mr. Spector will break down the elements of the Nordstrom philosophy and explain how they can be adapted for virtually every kind of organization by detailing the nine management principles that have made them the gold standard for customer service.

Parature’s “Best Practices in Customer Service” webinar series is designed to serve as an educational and informational resource for organizations throughout numerous industry sectors to gain insight into customer service best practices and to improve the customer experience. To register for any webinar in the series or to view previous webinars visit www.parature.com/webinars.

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.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to post the Q&A yet due to another event and Mr. Spector taking a well-deserved vacation, but we still hope to get those up at some point.

Watch this webinar

The customer experience has never been more important than it is in today’s service environment. Customer service is driven by the customer experience and the people inside a company provide that experience – whatever employees experience on the ‘inside’ is similar to what customers will experience ‘on the outside.’ This thought provoking white paper will compel you to ask the following:

• Is my company in alignment?
• Does every employee understand the vision?
• Do our employees love their jobs?

The Cult of the Customer explores concepts, lessons and strategies that will show you how to build a customer service culture that will make your customers and employees ‘amazing.’ Read this white paper to discover powerful customer service and experience concepts that can help increase:

• Customer loyalty
• Employee morale
• Employee loyalty
• Value to your customers
• Your bottom line
• The value of your brand

For more in-depth insight in to the concepts, lessons and strategies that can help your organization to have a customer focused culture and begin to create amazing experiences, watch the recorded version of this webinar.

Download the White Paper

In today’s environment, the customer has never been more important - customer satisfaction and retention are critical to any organization’s success, and customer service is essential to that end. The most efficient and successful customer support departments are versatile; providing their customers with a preferred method of support. Today’s customers are tech-savvy and require so much more than simple phone support. Integrated multi-channel service options, such as self-service via knowledgebases and downloads, live chat sessions, mobile applications, ticket systems, social networks, and easy issue escalation paths via the Web must be implemented to empower support teams to provide the level of service that customers expect. 

The white paper entitled “Multi-Channel Service: Enhancing the Customer Experience” is available for download now.

The webinar features John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). His area of expertise is in creating strategies for improving the overall customer experience and services operation through technology.

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.

Download the Coremetrics success story

Every day, more than 2,000 online business sites globally – with transactions representing over $20 billion per year – rely on Coremetrics to optimize their online marketing.

Most significantly, the company’s clients are happy. Yet not that long ago, Coremetrics recognized it was time to take support to the next level to drive client satisfaction.

“We recognized the need to provide our clients the 24×7 help needed, but in a scalable way,” said Paige Newcombe, senior director, Global Client Services. “The metrics spoke to the need to offer new support solutions to our clients.”

Download this customer success story and discover how leading marketing optimization software provider Coremetrics increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and revenue with Web self-service.

How to Tell Anyone Anything - Discussing the Issue

If you have been following this blog series faithfully, you have seen the first steps in painlessly having difficult discussions with your staff: starting in a safe place, asking good questions, and acknowledging people. Now, in this final installment, we get to the fun part: getting the issue itself on the table, whether it is performance, attitude, or even personal issues like hygiene.

When you do these first three steps well, you will find that you can now be extraordinarily frank about whatever you want to discuss – IF you do the following two things:

Step 1: Boil the issue down into facts

I am a huge baseball fan. And do you know what my friends usually say when their favorite teams lose? Things like “they stunk” or “they choked.” Here’s the problem: these terms are not only threatening, they are completely useless. There is no such thing as an anti-stink drill or a non-choking procedure. What really happened is that their team dropped a critical pop-fly in the eighth inning, or the opposing team had a more accurate pitcher on the mound – and *that* is what you can actually change.

So suppose someone literally stinks, because they don’t shower as often as they need to? The facts are as follows: “Some people are more sensitive than others when people around them get active and sweaty.” Now, instead of criticizing a person, you are troubleshooting a problem. Let’s look at how to describe some other situations factually instead of emotionally:

Emotional: You act disengaged when you are on the line with a customer. You don’t care enough.
Factual: I can see why customers sometimes react badly to you. You jump right into problem-solving – but if you acknowledge a customer first, they would feel heard and probably treat you better.

Emotional: Your performance hasn’t been up to par lately.
Factual: Normally, a typical employee handles X transactions per day. Your productivity has been about 40% of that recently.

In general, the more factual you get, the easier the discussion will go – and when people push back, get even more factual. Suppose, for example, you are talking with a support rep who has a problem getting angry with customers, and he replies, “You’re wrong, I don’t get angry”? Break this down into “I notice that you say X to customers in certain situations, and here is how they react.

Step 2: Make the other person part of the solution

Boiling a situation down into facts is an important way to bring an issue on the table, but don’t stop there! Your goal isn’t just to present issues and make people squirm – or worse, tell them what to do and risk getting “yessed” with no real progress. Your goal is to create positive behavioral changes. And the best way to do that is to invite the other person to solve the problem. Use phrases like these, and be sure to state them in the same breath as your problem statement:

• Where do you think we could go with this?
• How would you solve this problem?
• What is your take on the situation?
• What do you think might be the reasons for this?
• What would you propose?

Statements like these have two important benefits. First, you are encouraging honest dialogue. Would you rather be told, “I’ll stop doing this forthwith” and have it still keep happening – or have someone frankly acknowledge their struggles so you can address them? I thought so. More important, you are showing the other person the respect of solving problems collaboratively, and that respect, in and of itself, is a big factor in your success.

Techniques like these are extremely powerful, not only because they work so well, but because they have the accumulated wisdom of decades of behavioral psychology behind them. And when I made this approach a cornerstone of managing my own call center teams, it was truly magical to watch people grow, change, and even welcome my feedback. So put them to work yourself, and discover the secrets of being able to tell anyone anything.

Rich Gallagher is a communications skills expert, author, and former help desk executive. His book What to Say to a Porcupine: 20 Humorous Tales that Get to the Heart of Excellent Customer Service (AMACOM, 2008) was a national #1 customer service and business humor bestseller that was a finalist for the 2008 Business Book Awards, and his latest book How to Tell Anyone Anything (AMACOM, 2009) explores the mechanics of difficult workplace conversations. Visit Rich online at www.pointofcontactgroup.com

How to Tell Anyone Anything - The Power of Acknowledgement

When you coach someone, you are probably hoping it will go something like this: first, you ask someone to change something. Then the other person politely nods their head and says that forthwith they will start logging their cases better, being nicer to customers, coming in on time, showering more often, or whatever.

But it doesn’t ever seem to work that way, does it? Instead, you often hear excuses, defenses, and their side of the story. And I am here to tell you that these things are all *wonderful* to hear. Why? Because they give you the chance to use the most powerful coaching tool of all: acknowledgement.

You see, the only reason that people ever argue with you, push back against you, or “yes” you without buying in is that they feel you don’t see their view of the world. Think carefully about the last time your boss called you out about something – how did you feel inside? Ring-a-ding-ding. We all contain an almost magical ability to justify and defend ourselves, no matter how “right” the other person is. Which means that our usual approach of showing people how wrong they are is generally doomed to failure.

Which means that one of the most powerful tools in coaching is a secret that has long been used by hostage negotiators, crisis counselors, and psychotherapists in their most difficult situations: acknowledge the other person’s view, each and every time they open their mouths. This step feels like “kissing up” to the uninitiated, but in reality it opens the door to productive dialogue. Because when you acknowledge the other person’s view of the world – which is not the same as agreeing with it – they lose the power to argue with you, and you gain the power to get more of what you want. (We’ll talk about that in the next blog installment.)

Let’s look at an example: suppose you have an agent who is rude to customers. Compare these two dialogues:

Without acknowledgement:
Chris Cranky: It’s all the fault of these stupid customers. They have no idea what they are doing.
You: That doesn’t excuse you from being polite. I expect you to be much nicer to people in the future.
Chris Cranky: (sigh) OK boss …

With acknowledgement:
Chris Cranky: It’s all the fault of these stupid customers. They have no idea what they are doing.
You: It must be frustrating when people don’t learn our product and take up your time.
Chris Cranky: You bet. I really feel stuck in situations like these.
You: Most of us would. Maybe I can help. I notice that when customers frustrate you, you sometimes say things like, “It sounds like you have no idea what you are doing.” How do people react to that?
Chris Cranky: Pretty badly!
You: Would you be OK saying something instead like, “Lots of people find software like this confusing when they are new to it. Would you like to hear about some learning options we have?”
Chris Cranky: Sure, that might help me set boundaries more comfortably.

When you break down nearly any coaching situation, taking an acknowledging stance turns defensiveness into productive dialogue – even in very difficult situations. Try it yourself and see what a change it makes!

Rich Gallagher is a communications skills expert, author, and former help desk executive. His book What to Say to a Porcupine: 20 Humorous Tales that Get to the Heart of Excellent Customer Service (AMACOM, 2008) was a national #1 customer service and business humor bestseller that was a finalist for the 2008 Business Book Awards, and his latest book How to Tell Anyone Anything (AMACOM, 2009) explores the mechanics of difficult workplace conversations. Visit Rich online at www.pointofcontactgroup.com