Fall 2008
The Care and Feeding of Difficult Customers By Rich Gallagher

Type in the phrase “customer service skills” in your favorite search engine and you will get approximately 3 million hits. There is no lack of information out there about how to improve your service quality and grow your business. But what kind of customer experience do you usually have when you go shopping, or call someone for service? Sometimes it feels like people could write three million more articles and nothing would change.

There is a reason for this, and as a gift retailer, it has the potential to become one of your biggest competitive advantages: good service is not human nature. You could talk all day about having a good attitude or smiling at people, but the reality is that when customers act difficult or have a problem, most of us revert to our survival instincts and defend our policies and ourselves. But learning specific techniques for what to say to customers can dramatically change the way they react to you, particularly in difficult situations.

Mechanics is everything

It is possible to confidently manage things like impossible requests, angry people, and difficult employees. Interestingly enough, great service has little to do with being “nice,” and lots to do with learning specific, procedural skills.

Here’s what to say and how to act when confronted with the most common but difficult customer service situations: being asked to bend the rules and give refunds, responding to rude people, and defusing angry customers. Some solutions might feel counterintuitive—like wearing a T-shirt backwards. But all of them are based on known principles of behavioral psychology, and will make a dramatic difference in how people react. This in turn, will make a real change in your bottom line.

Never, ever, say no

Take the all too common situation where someone wants to return something, and you don’t give refunds or exchanges. Most of us would lead with our interests, and say things like “I’m sorry sir, we can’t do that.” Setting boundaries with customers seems logical and rational—but it almost always leads to an angry person who argues with you and never darkens your door again.

The reason for this dates back to our survival instincts. All of us have an instinctive friend-versus-foe reflex, which psychologists call “social cognition,” where people decide in the first thirty seconds whether they are dealing with a friend or a foe. When you respond with “foe” language—no matter how right you are—the other person’s defenses almost always kick into high gear.

The key to using “friend” language in situations like these, while still preserving your boundaries, lies in a technique called the “can-can,” where you respond with what you can acknowledge and can do. For example:

What you can acknowledge: “Isn’t it frustrating when people don’t like your gifts?”

What you can do: “For non-refundable gifts like these, we can wrap these to use as a present for someone later—and if you like, we’d be glad to show that person some really nice things we could order for them.”

It might feel funny to say “I can do X” when every fiber of your body wants to respond with what you can’t do. But language is really important in situations like these, and when you use “friend” language instead of simply saying “no,” you are much more likely to send the other person away feeling better –and more important, keeping their repeat business.

Dealing with prickly porcupines

Imagine a group of rude, demanding and prickly porcupines who invade the merchants of a local forest. They are loud and boorish, demand to be served first, and could care less about keeping their children in line.

After discovering that trying to argue with these creatures would often lead to both hard feelings and a face full of sharp quills, the merchants finally turn to the wise Dr. Owl, an animal psychologist.

What Dr. Owl taught them is that the only way to make rude people turn their behavior around is to speak to their interests. Try these responses to provocative statements on for size. Porcupine: “Can’t I get any service around here?”
Typical response: “Sir, I am waiting on other customers!”
Better response: “I’m glad you came to our store, and I’m really sorry about the wait. I’m going to get to you as soon as I possibly can.”
Porcupine: “This looks like a piece of junk!”
Typical response: “Sir, we only stock high-quality products here.”
Better response: “I don’t blame you for having high standards. I am really particular about what gifts I give to people I care about. What kinds of things do you look for?”

The irony is that speaking to a rude person’s interest, by acknowledging and validating whatever they say—which is not the same as agreeing with them—gives you more power with them, not less. Try it on for size, and see how people react. Very often, you will find that the “porcupines” who complain the most often become your strongest supporters.

Defusing customer anger

Anger is one of our most intimate and powerful emotions. It is designed to kick into gear when there is a danger to ourselves and the people we love, so that we have the energy to protect ourselves. For example, think of a mother animal defending her cubs.

This is why anger feels very uncomfortable and out of place in a customer situation. No one’s cubs are being threatened, but there is someone yelling and screaming across the counter from you because a product broke, or something didn’t get delivered. What do you do then?

The answer is that you use a three-step process that I call the “triple A” technique, which helps guide angry people into a zone where you can negotiate productively with them: You acknowledge their concerns, ask assessment questions to gather information and calm them down, and then explore face-saving alternatives to send them away happy.

Examine the case of an angry customer bringing a broken model railroad kit back to a gift shop, feeling that this ruined his son’s birthday. Here are some of the steps I walk the retailer through to turn down the heat: Customer: You stupid idiots wouldn’t give my son his money back on this broken toy, on his birthday! He just came home in tears. I am outraged about this. How dare you tell my son he can’t get his money back on this rotten, defective product!

Acknowledgement: I can tell by your tone of voice how upset you are, and I’m sorry this happened. I know my kids would be very upset if their birthday presents got broken too. Let’s see what we can do about this.

Assessment: Did you bring the toy back with you? Tell me what happened. What was your son doing when this broke?

Alternatives: We can arrange for the manufacturer to try and replace this part. But if you really need to make your son happy on his birthday, I could sell you a new starter kit with the replacement part at a discount.

In situations like this, remember that feelings are never wrong—so when you have those “uh-oh” moments where you don’t know what to say in a confrontation, validating what the other person is saying and feeling is usually a near-perfect response. From there, combining good questions with reasonable alternatives will lead most angry confrontations to a calm conclusion.

More than an attitude

If there is one principle that will set your store apart from the rest, it is that good service is a skill, not an attitude. It is a set of specific communications techniques, based on known principles of behavioral psychology, which change the dynamics of difficult customer situations and create customers for life. When you put these skills to work in your store, the difference will be real and measurable. Make an investment in reading, learning, and practicing these skills—and more important, teach them to every person on your team—and the rewards will come back to you many times over.

Rich Gallagher

Rich Gallagher is the author of a new business fable collection What to Say to a Porcupine: 20 Humorous Tales that Get to the Heart of Great Customer Service (AMACOM 2008) and Great Customer Connections (AMACOM 2006). He is a noted expert on communications skills and customer service, with a track record of dramatically turning around the performance of customer contact operations. Visit him online at www.WhatToSayToaPorcupine.com.




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