Can you summarize the most important principles I should apply when dealing with angry or abusive customers?
In the Defusing Hostile Customers Workbook, and our seminars, we explain there are twelve important principles customer service staff should apply when dealing with and interacting with abusive, or angry customers. They are designed to help you shorten the time needed to deal with these customers, reduce your frustrations, keep you safer, all the while helping you provide a positive customer experience even to those customers who are unpleasant.
Here’s the summary:
There are twelve principles that you can use to guide your defusing efforts. Review all twelve to ensure your success the next time you are called upon to defuse a hostile customer.
1. Deal with the feelings first
2. Avoid Coming Across as bureaucratic
3. Each situation is different
4. Strive to control the interaction
5. Begin defusing early
6. Be assertive, not aggressive or passive
7. If you lose control of yourself, you lose, period
8. What you focus on, you get more of
9. Don’t supply ammunition
10. Don’t ask questions you don’t want to hear answers to
11. Avoid inadvertent errors
12. Avoid high risk, high gain behavior
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 Knowledge base (which you are reading now) is based on the material in these books.
