Customer Service Reader

Anger triggers

You can help defuse a tense encounter, or at least not make it worse, by avoiding behaviors that trigger anger in customers. Here are some common triggers to avoid.

Non-verbal triggers

• Tone of voice: sarcastic, condescending, disbelieving 
• Body language: looking away, looking at your watch, smirking, scoffing, rolling your eyes, drumming your fingers, invading personal space
• Other trigger actions: Long wait times (waiting to speak to a manager, long hold times, etc), hanging up on customers, passing the buck

Verbal triggers, and what to say or do instead
(Alternatives proposed below are guidelines, not scripts. Smart customers can see through scripts – be authentic, use your own words)

• You’re wrong.   
  It doesn’t help to tell customers that they’re wrong, even when they are. Just courteously state the facts, as supported by evidence. Let the facts speak for themselves.
• I’m sorry you feel that way.
  People can see through this old trick. Say sorry only when you’re sorry. Even when the customer is not completely right, identify what could have been done better, and apologize for those mistakes.
• I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
  May have caused? If an inconvenience was caused, apologize for it directly.
• That’s the policy … I can’t do that
  "That’s contrary to our policy, but I know what you mean. Let me see what I can do."
• No way ... Not gonna happen ... That's impossible
  "I tried to do that for another customer, but I really couldn't get it approved."
• That’s not my job.
  It is your job. Take ownership of the problem.
• As I’d already said … As I’d said before
  Just repeat or paraphrase what you had said, without saying you’d already said it.
• You have to . . .
  "Would you please …"   
• I don’t know.
  Find out.    
• I assume . . . I guess
  Get the facts. Don’t assume, don’t guess.
• You should have …
  "In case this happens again, it might help you to …"
• Calm down.
  These words often have the opposite effect. Practice calming techniques instead.
• I’m going to have to end this conversation … You must leave the building
  This ought to be the last resort, but it’s too frequently thrown about by people who do not have the ability or the inclination to manage difficult situations. Should only be used when customers are truly dysfunctional.

Have a favorite trigger? Please share it here.

Dysfunctional customers

Customer service initiatives should be grounded in integrity and reality. One aspect of that reality is that in fact customers are not always right. It undermines one’s credibility to contend that they are. This paper is an important contribution to the understanding that there are dysfunctional customers, and that their behaviors have serious consequences.

While I agree with most of the propositions in this paper, I have one fundamental disagreement. In my long experience at the front lines of customer service, I have found that dysfunctional customers are rare. More often than not, disruptive behaviors can be avoided by (1) providing good customer service in the first place, and (2) managing situations before they get out of hand.

I should probably note that the most egregious manifestations of dysfunctional behavior cited in this study occurred in bars.

Excerpts from The consequences of dysfunctional customer behavior
Lloyd C Harris & Kate L Reynolds in Journal of Service Research

This article addresses dysfunctional customer behavior, which refers to actions by customers who intentionally or unintentionally, overtly or covertly, act in a manner that, in some way, disrupts otherwise functional service encounters.

Classifications of dysfunctional customers

Zemke and Anderson, typology of five "customers from hell":

• abusive egocentrics
• insulting whiners
• hysterical shouters
• dictators
• freeloaders

With the objective of gaining faster, superior, or even free service, such customers use service encounters in a dysfunctional manner (at least from the perspective of service providers and other customers).

Lovelock's "jaycustomers":

• thieves
• rule breakers
• the belligerent
• vandals
• family feuders
• deadbeats

Drivers and forms of dysfunctional customer behavior

• psychological characteristics - personality traits, attitudes, the extent of moral development, aspiration fulfillment, the desire for thrill seeking, and aberrant psychological dispositions
• demographic characteristics - age, sex, education, and economic status
• social influences - socialization, norm formation, and peer pressure
• contextual factors - physical environment, types of products/services offered, level of deterrence, public image of the firm
• perceptions of a store's relative power
• customer dissatisfaction - consumer retaliation due to customer perceptions of inequalities and the need to restore equity
• combination of the interaction characteristics

Key findings of this study

• All of the customer-contact employees interviewed reported that they witnessed, or were involved in, some form of dysfunctional customer behavior on a daily basis
• 82% of customer-contact staff had either witnessed or been subjected to violent or aggressive behavior within the last calendar year
• 54% believe that their working lives were "significantly affected" by unrelenting dysfunctional customer behavior

Figure 1 is a framework of the consequences of dysfunctional customer behavior. Briefly, the framework presents three main consequences of dysfunctional customer behavior, namely, effects on (1) employees, (2) customers, and (3) the organization.

Effects on employees

Long-Term Psychological Consequences

• sustained feelings of degradation, humiliation, or subjugation - feelings of worthlessness and humiliation long after specific events
• stress disorders - caused by extreme dysfunctional customer behavior that years later continued to result in memory flashbacks, anxiety, and sleeplessness

Short-Term Emotional Effects

93% of employees interviewed indicated that dysfunctional customer behavior negatively affected their emotional state.

• short-term emotional distress, such as fear, stress, frustration, anger, hatred, and irritation
• feigned emotional display - what has become known as emotional labor

Behavioral Consequences

• low levels of motivation and morale among customer-contact employees.
• high levels of esprit de corps and effective customer-contact employee teamwork
• increased desire of customer-contact employees to retaliate, to take revenge, or to sabotage the efforts of dysfunctional customers

Physical Consequences

• violence toward an employee
• damage of employees' personal property

78% of informants reported that they had witnessed or encountered more "restrained" forms of physical violence by customers.

Consequences for customers

Domino effect

• collective expression of sympathy toward the frontline employee who has been a victim of "unreasonable" customer behavior or, less frequently
• the contagion of dysfunctional customer behavior by witnesses of the customers' behavior, particularly vociferous or illegitimate complaining

Spoilt Consumption Effects

Exposure to acute or sustained dysfunctional customer behavior increases the likelihood that the consumption experience of proximate customers will be negatively affected.

Organizational consequences

Indirect Financial Costs

• increased workloads for members of staff who are required to deal with dysfunctional customer behavior, thus reducing employee time to serve functional customers effectively
• negative financial implications for personnel in terms of staff retention, recruitment, induction, and training

46% of informants claim that they had no long-term career plans in their employing organization or even the broader hospitality industry due to frequent exposure to such behavior.

Direct Financial Costs

Acute or sustained dysfunctional customer behavior increases the likelihood of direct financial costs, in terms of expenses incurred in restoring damaged property, additional legal costs, increased insurance premiums, property loss, costs incurred in recompensing customers, and the costs accrued through "illegitimate" claims by dysfunctional customers.

Discussions and Implications

• The current study illustrates the pervasiveness of dysfunctional customer behavior and, in this regard, undermines the veracity of the notion of consumer sovereignty in that dysfunctional customer behavior is consistently found.
• Not only are customers "not always right," in fact, they can frequently lie, cheat, act abusively, and even physically or psychologically harm customer-contact employees.
• The mantra "customer perception is reality" is too frequently mentioned to the detriment of the accuracy, legitimacy, validity, and communality of such a reality. From the perspective of customer-contact employees, many customers' views of reality are not simply incorrect but, all too frequently, personally damaging and in some cases intentionally biased.
• In many organizations, there appears to be dichotomous realities for those serving and in daily contact with customers and those who generate and enforce customer-related policies. Thus, the espoused cultural beliefs and prescribed procedures enforced centrally appear somewhat divorced from the perceived reality of the customer interface.
• This study also provides another illustration of the need of customer service encounters to be, in the broader sense of the term, "managed." That is, these results confirm and further emphasize the need for service organizations to ensure that every aspect and moment of service encounters is considered, organized, carefully staged, controlled, and supervised by the firm.  The contribution of the current study is to highlight the need for the differentiated management of functional and dysfunctional customers.
• The emphasis placed on improving service standards in the 1990s and the earlier stress on customer focus in the 1980s have overemphasized the view of customer sovereignty and underplayed the dysfunctional, the deviant, and the dark side of service.

LEAP away from stress

The main source of stress in the service environment is the angry customer. We can reduce the frequency and instensity of this stressor by (a) taking care of customers in the first place, so that they have no reason to be angry, and (b) defusing anger and fixing our mistakes through recovery processes such as LEAP.

Stressful situations normally result from the customer's perception that we are the enemy. When we make the customers realize that we are, on the contrary, their advocates, we remove the principal source of that stress.

Customer service can kill you

Excerpts from
Emotion Regulation in the Workplace: A New Way to Conceptualize Emotional Labor
Alicia A Grandey, Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University
in Journal of Occupational Health Psychology

Customer Service Performance

• In the service industry, managing emotions (showing happiness and empathy, not fear or anger) is an important facet of maintaining loyal customers and repeat business.
• As a means of presenting a positive image of the organization and inducing the appropriate feelings in customers, managing emotions may result in good customer service performance.
• However, the personal effort of emotion regulation may impair cognitive performance.
• Burnout is a stress outcome typically found in employees in the helping industries.
• Several authors have mentioned the importance of emotional displays being seen as “genuine” in service settings.
• Emotional expressions that are perceived as insincere may negatively impact customer service. Emotion research has found that when people “fake” emotions, there seems to be “leakage” so that observers can detect the deception. Surface acting is negatively related to service performance.
• If employees are not showing genuine expressions, emotional labor may be dysfunctional to employees by creating a need to dissociate from self.
• Individuals generally do not like to feel "fake", because suppressing true emotions and expressing false emotions requires effort that results in stress outcomes.
• Research has linked the inhibition of emotions to a variety of physical illness, including higher blood pressure and cancer. Inability to express negative emotion is one of the strongest predictors of cancer.
• When employees really feel the way they act, it is perceived as genuine, and is positively related to customer service.
• Servers who don't feel "false," have more job satisfaction than those who fake emotions.

Autonomy

• Feeling a lack of control over events has been identified as a source of life stress, as well as job stress.
• Those who have high autonomy have lower emotional exhaustion in both high and low emotional labor-typed jobs. Job autonomy is negatively related to emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion, and positively related to job satisfaction.

Supervisor and coworker support

• Support from coworkers and supervisors creates a positive working environment. An employee's perception that she works in a supportive climate has been found to relate to job satisfaction, lowered stress, and turnover intentions, and higher team performance.
• Those who perceive high levels of supervisor support may report high levels of emotional labor but not burnout because support acts as a buffer against the stressors.
• Support may help employees cope with the stress of service jobs. Talking to other people is a method of coping with difficult customers. Disclosure of emotional events helps individuals cope with stress and buffer against health risks. Social support in service settings helps protect individuals from stress, and is a buffer against job dissatisfaction.
• In customer service settings, where positive expressions are expected, feeling positive about the social environment may mean that less emotional labor is necessary. One may genuinely feel the emotions that are expected in a service environment if the interpersonal relationships are positive and supportive.

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Moral of the story:

For the Manager: Forcing people to serve customers is counter-productive. Instead, you should hire the right people, serve them as you would have them serve the customer, and give them the power to serve.

For the Provider: We all have to pretend some of the time. But if you have to fake it most of the time, customer service may kill you. You should probably get a less stressful job.

LEAP to the customer's side

Anyone can be nice to nice customers. There's almost no skill involved in that. What separates the professionals from the amateurs is the ability to manage "difficult" customers.

Customers can be “difficult” (angry, upset, frustrated) for various reasons. Most of the time it’s because of something someone did, or failed to do. Regardless of whether the anger is justified or not, as customer service professionals we can take the opportunity to turn a bad situation into a good one.

There are customers you will dislike because of their attitudes, complaints, and demands. While the experience may be unpleasant at first, these customers are very valuable to us. In clear language — and for free — they help us think about what we can do better. Constant improvement, as well as outstanding service, is at the root of every great organization.

LISTEN

• Listening is the first and most important step in dealing with anger. It calms the customer down and shows your concern.
• Sometimes what customers really want is for someone to hear them out and see their point of view. We can always give them that.
• Hear them out – do not interrupt, talk over, or hurry them.
• Avoid the tendency to think of your rebuttal while the customer is speaking.
• Remain calm. Don't take the complaint personally. If you did nothing wrong, the customer has no reason to be upset at you personally. You just embody the company in the customer's mind.
• Practice “sorting” - isolate the problem by ignoring sarcasm, exaggeration, and personal attacks.
• Give your undivided attention. Customers know when you’re just pretending to listen - they're on to "listening" tricks.
• Ask questions to get the facts.
• Paraphrase what the customer tells you.
• Take notes, and recap your notes. Ask the customer if you missed anything.

EMPATHIZE

• Empathy is the ability to know how another feels, as if you were in their place.
• Empathy does not necessarily mean that you agree with the customer’s feelings or behavior, but that you do understand them.
• Be considerate of the customer’s feelings.
• Be courteous.
• Show interest and willingness to help.
• People can tell if you are trying to understand, or just pretending to understand.
• Empathy begins with self-awareness and self-control, understanding your own emotions and reactions, and managing them appropriately towards a resolution.

APOLOGIZE

• One customer normally has more than one complaint, some valid, some not. Recognize what we could have done better.
• Apologize for our mistakes.
• Do not blame others or make excuses.
• Take ownership of the problem, even if it's not your fault. To the customer, you are the company.
• Thank the customer for bringing the problem to our attention, and for giving us the opportunity to make good on a mistake.
• If the customer is wrong, it does no good to say so. If demands are unreasonable, and you have no acceptable solution, you may need to get your manager involved.

PROBLEM-SOLVE

• Be the customer’s advocate.
• Take charge. Take responsibility and initiative to do whatever you can to solve the problem as quickly as possible.
• Focus on what you can, not cannot do.
• Look for common ground, work towards a solution together. Discuss a range of solutions, including what the customer thinks is a reasonable resolution.
• Propose a solution and get their support.
• Determine what you plan to do, why, how you plan to do it, who else needs to be involved, when this will happen, next steps.
• Follow up. The customer’s principal expectation is that you will do what you say you are going to do.
• Learn. What did we learn from this? How can we prevent it from recurring?

See also:
LEAP away from stress
Anger triggers
Daniel Goleman on Empathy
John Goodman on Complaints