Customer Service Skills Knowledge Base and Frequently Asked Questions
How can I continue to improve my ability to deal with difficult, aggressive, and insulting customers?
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• Defusing Hostile Customers Workbook
• Perfect Phrases For Customer Service
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Even if you use our Defusing Hostile Customers Workbook, or attend a seminar on the topic of dealing with obnoxious or difficult customers, ultimately, whether you improve or not is up to you. A workbook or training can get you started, but only you can continue to improve through thinking, practice, and observation. Here are some tips from our workbook:
Here's a series of tactics to employ that will develop your defusing hostility skills.
* Remind Yourself - at the beginning of each working day, remind yourself of one or two defusing tactics you would like to focus upon. It might be not taking the bait, or using a particular empathy statement, or recognizing when it is a good time to refer to a supervisor. It can be whatever you like, provided you choose SOMETHING each day.
* Review Progress - we suggest you take a few minutes at the end of the work day to review how you did.
* Keep A Hostility Diary - If you want to be a bit more formal, where you record "critical incidents" and how you handled them.
* Defuse In Your Private Life - tactics particularly useful in private life include:
o avoiding bait
o empathy statements
o listening statements
o problem solving tactics
o avoiding being triggered
* Talk To Colleagues
* Read Other Books
Robert Bacal is the author of two books on customer service: Perfect Phrases for Customer Service: Hundreds of Tools, Techniques, and Scripts for Handling Any Situation, and Defusing Hostile Customers Workbook. Most of the questions and answers in the Customer Service Knowledgebase (which you are reading now) is based on the material in these books.