Dealing with angry customers

SMART WAYS

For business, customers are everything. Enraged customers can be hard to deal with. They feel let down when their product (or more often, service) goes wrong and they want to hit back. Of course, yelling at the only person who can help them is not good policy but it’s difficult for most people not to do this and it’s even harder for the company employee or manager to take things calmly when confronted with an angry customer.

All too often, a customer complaint ends up degenerating into a shouting match between the customer and the manager-even if an employee is empowered to disconnect from the customer (for instance, by hanging up the telephone or calling Security), this does not solve the problem.

Ultimately, people solve problems for themselves. If the problem cannot be resolved by talking to the person who supplied them, the customer will go to someone who can solve the problem-usually a competitor. Not only does this lose you, the customer, it also generates a large amount of negative word of mouth.

In practice

• Let the customer vent their feelings—and don’t take it personally.
• Find out calmly what the root of the problem is, and offer a solution.
• Follow up afterward to check that the problem has been solved— don’t assume it’s all OK just because the customer didn’t come back to complain again.
• Express sympathy for their unpleasant customer experience. Respect and understanding go a long way toward smoothing things over.
• Apologising is the key to saving customer relationship. So say ‘sorry’.
• Try to ensure that the same problem doesn’t happen again for another customer.