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If your job consisted of handing out $100 bills to people, would it be easier to talk to customers? Perhaps. But it probably doesn’t. So today, let’s look at some ways you can deliver bad news to people, in a way that will keep things polite and civil on both sides.

First, however, this is not one of these “five bullet point” articles with nice but obvious tips. This is a very powerful technique that works extremely well, based on techniques from crisis intervention. (Incidentally, I am a former crisis counselor.) But be aware that it takes practice. Whenever I teach this approach to people in live training, as I have to about 6,000 people and counting, almost everyone nods their head in agreement – and then when we do live role-playing, they freeze like deer in the headlights and revert to what they have been saying for the last 20 years. That’s OK, and completely normal.

But when people do learn it, the effect is very powerful – and when a whole team starts responding this way, a process that often takes weeks of coaching, the results are truly magical to watch. Deconstruct how the very best service leaders handle difficult situations with you, and you will probably find an approach similar to this. So here goes …
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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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