CHAPTER 3
Achieving Deep
Acknowledgment
YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW to acknowledge other people. Especially difficult ones.
I mean this statement in the nicest possible way. In my experience working with groups ranging from senior executives to front-line employees, the vast majority do not know how to acknowledge a truly obnoxious, demanding customer. These are good people who try hard to do the right thing with customers, and they either struggle with what to say as they are being taunted, baited, or yelled at, or they fall back on empty catchphrases that don’t work.
Now I am going to make another bold statement: Your inability to acknowledge people causes the vast majority of your most difficult customer situations.
“Wait a minute!” you are probably thinking. “Why is it my fault when people get too emotional, have unrealistic demands, or won’t accept the best that we can do?”
The reason is that more often than you think, these seemingly one-way encounters are really a dance with two partners. Here is why: Even outrageous customer behavior often calms down when it is heard instead of just reacted to. Conversely, it usually escalates when it isn’t heard. Compare these two responses:
Customer: This is totally unacceptable!
You: I can tell by your tone of voice how annoyed you must be. No one likes to be kept waiting like you were. Let’s look at some options together.
The first response may sound reasonable on paper, but it translates to customers as, “Drop dead. We don’t care what you think or feel.” Often, it will provoke a reaction. The second response “gets” the customer by letting her know you heard her frustration before you move to the heavy lifting of negotiating a solution. Being able to respond this way simply requires being taught new skills.
This leads me to a third bold statement: Acknowledging people is the most powerful tool you have in difficult customer situations. It is often the only way to turn anger into productive dialogue. In this chapter, we look at why most of us would rather drink poison than acknowledge others—and how we can change this.
Why We Don’t Acknowledge Demanding Customers
Why is acknowledging the concerns of your worst customers so difficult? I believe it is a simple problem of linguistics: We have a mistaken idea of what the word itself means.
The roots of the word acknowledge date back to the fifteenth century, when it meant to give your accord to another person’s knowledge. It does not mean that you are agreeing with the other person. Nor does it mean that you will give him whatever he wants. It just means that you respect his viewpoint, even if you personally disagree with it.
Because we wrongly feel that acknowledging infuriating, demanding people is the same as giving in to them, we often—with the best intentions—do the one thing that is guaranteed to never, ever work: Point out how wrong they are. We explain our policies, set boundaries, or worse, try to “educate” these customers about how their problems are their own fault. Then they predictably pose, posture, threaten us, and demand to speak to our managers.
Most crisis professionals will tell you that good acknowledgments are the easiest and most powerful way to defuse a situation while still respecting your own boundaries. Moreover, acknowledgment is a totally mechanical process. Once you learn how to do it, you can practically do it in your sleep.
The Four Powerful Levels of Response
This chapter will teach you what I call the “ladder of acknowledgment”: four increasingly powerful levels of response that you can choose from in a difficult customer situation, each of which can dramatically help you defuse it. These four levels are:
1. Paraphrasing: Mirroring the customer’s statements empathetically
2. Observation: Reflecting what the customer is thinking and feeling
3. Validation: Letting customers know their feelings are valid—at least to them
4. Identification: Sharing what you feel in common with the customer
By choosing one of these four approaches—paraphrasing their words, observing their thoughts and feelings, validating their concerns, or identifying with their emotions—you provide a face-saving way for difficult customers to calm down and enter into a rational, problem-solving dialogue with you. Let’s look at how these four approaches work.
Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is easy and powerful. You simply take whatever other people say, gift wrap it with your own words, and hand it right back to them. In the process, you let them know that (a) you heard them, (b) you have processed what they are saying, and (c) it is safe to talk about it.
Paraphrasing Your Way out of Trouble
One client of mine, a major state university, had a big problem: graduation audits. Students would contact the administration and say, “Hi there! I’m ready to graduate!” The school would do a lengthy audit to see if the student really was ready to graduate. Sometimes the answer was no—a student would be two credits short, or lack a distribution requirement, or something else. Often, staff members so dreaded calling students back about this that they put off doing it.
So the next time I did a presentation for the staff, I invited one brave person to come up on stage with me and role-play this situation. And she did a truly wonderful job. Shouting and pointing her finger in my face for emphasis, she exclaimed, “This is no fair! No one told me about any of this! And I have a job waiting in two weeks! This is all your fault! You have got to fix this!”
In response, I did exactly what I told the audience I would do: I simply paraphrased everything she said. Here are some of the things I said in response:
“Wow, so no one ever told you about this!”
“You’ve got a job in two weeks, so this is really urgent!”
“We’ve got to find a way to help you graduate as soon as possible!”
Her response? She stood there with a look of stunned silence on her face, thinking to herself, “Hey, wait a minute! I’m trying to get angry with this guy, in front of all these people, and I don’t know what to say!” That’s because I had addressed everything she brought up, every time she opened her mouth.
When a customer gets upset with you, and you have no idea what to say in response, paraphrasing is a great place to start because the customer is handing your response to you. Here are some techniques for doing it well:
Start with listening. Give customers the time and space to say whatever they feel they need to before you jump in with a response. Remember, a talking customer is your friend. He or she is giving you lots of information to paraphrase, as well as the time to create a good reply.
Respond—don’t editorialize. There is a time and place for your side of the story, and it isn’t when you first acknowledge someone. Good paraphrasing reflects the world as the customer sees it, not as you see it. Resist all temptation to spring your own agenda on what the other person is saying. For example, when a customer says, “I think your company stinks,” don’t respond with, “So you think our company stinks. Here is why we’re actually better than most companies.” Instead, stick to the customer’s agenda (“You are pretty upset with us. Tell me more.”).
Put their words into your own words. One example of paraphrasing that usually fails miserably is when workers at offshore call centers (who have usually been trained by nonnative English speakers) repeat what the other person says word for word. Has the following conversation ever happened to you?
Customer: My credit card bill has a huge error!
Call center agent: I see, sir. So you are telling me that your credit card bill has a huge error. Is that correct?
Customer (with some annoyance): Umm, yes, I just told you that!
The more you put a customer’s statements into your own words, the more you show how well you are listening. Practice replaying other people’s statements with new words and synonyms, and watch how much better people respond.
Observation
The next step up from paraphrasing is to make an observation about what the person is probably thinking or feeling. Suppose, for instance, that an airline customer just missed the last flight of the day. Instead of just paraphrasing her words (“Wow, you just missed the last flight!”), you reflect what is on her mind (“You were probably hoping to get home tonight. How frustrating!”).
Here are some examples of using observation phrases in difficult customer situations:
“I can tell by your tone of voice that you are pretty upset about this.”
“This obviously didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to.”
“I can see how important this is to you.”
Here are more tips for making good observations:
Guessing is OK. It is perfectly acceptable to use your best judgment about what the other person is thinking or feeling. First of all, your hunches are almost always going to be correct. Second, even if they aren’t, people generally will appreciate your honest attempt to hear them.
Don’t minimize emotions. As we discussed in the previous chapter, match or exceed the other person’s emotions step-by-step. Don’t use phrases like “It sounds like you had a little problem here.” Instead, go deep and mirror every inch of that person’s frustration (“Wow, this really messed up your event!”).
Plan your next step. This is true for all forms of acknowledgment, but especially observation: Don’t stop there. Otherwise you risk sounding patronizing and having an encounter like this:
Customer: This meal was horrible!
You: So you weren’t happy at all with your food.
Customer: Well, duh, yeah! What are you going to do about it?
In a case like this, simply adding a phrase like “Tell me what you didn’t like about your meal” can help. Better yet, “What can we do to make this right?” links your acknowledgment to a problem-solving dialogue, a topic we discuss in more detail in Chapter 6.
Validation
With paraphrasing, you hand people back their words. With observation, you voice their feelings. Validation takes things a powerful step further. As the word implies, you are not only observing a customer’s feelings but acknowledging that they are valid.
How do you do this? It’s simple. By definition, validation always involves letting customers know that other people share these feelings as well. Let’s look at some examples:
Customer: This product lasted only three months!
You: That’s terrible! No one likes having a product break down that soon.
Customer: I’ve been on hold for nearly a half hour!
You: Wow, that was a long time! Everyone hates waiting on hold.
Customer: I can’t figure out these instructions!
You: Don’t feel bad. Lots of people have trouble with these assembly instructions. I can help you.
The key is to invite a big crowd into your response with phrases like “everyone,” “lots of people,” “nobody,” “no one,” or “just about anyone.” Your goal is to let upset customers know that they are far from alone, and that their reactions are totally understandable. You can also personalize your comparisons by adding your own expertise into the mix. For instance, “In my experience, many people struggle with this.”
Done well, validation is an extremely powerful way to get an upset customer working with you as a team. With practice, it can also become a natural way of responding to people. Among the four techniques presented here, consider making this one your default for most situations.
The Higher Purpose of Validation:
Protecting People’s Feelings
You can also validate feelings that are never expressed or spoken. Remember, at the beginning of this chapter, how people in groups I’ve worked with often don’t know what to say? I don’t just stand there and feel sorry for them. I actively let them know—along with the audience—that their response is normal and that this is why they are in the course. For example, I might say:
“See that look of terror on Terri’s face? This is the most important thing you will learn today! [Audience laughs] But seriously, if any of you had bravely volunteered for this exercise, you would have probably reacted exactly the same way, and this is what I see with audiences all over the country. So now, let’s have some fun with this and learn what to say.”
Then I break the role-playing into steps and coach Terri so that she does a fantastic job and goes off the stage to a big round of applause. This way no one ever feels embarrassed, and people still want to hire me to come back and speak.
Identification
This is the highest rung on the ladder of acknowledgment: letting others know that you share how they feel, at some level. As with the other forms of acknowledgment, it does not mean that you agree with them or are giving in to them. It simply means that you can, by virtue of your common humanity, grasp how they might feel about a situation. In the process, you are creating a powerful bond with your customers.
While validation phrases talk about other people, identification phrases always involve you. Here are some examples:
“That would bother me too.”
“If I were in that situation, I would probably react the same way.”
“What happened to you wouldn’t have seemed fair to me either.”
“I can’t imagine what this situation must have put you through.”
“Here is what happened when I tried that.”
However, there are two kinds of situations when you shouldn’t use identification. The first is when you honestly cannot identify with the person. For instance, if a woman tells me how difficult her pregnancy is, I can’t say, “I can just imagine how that must be”—because I can’t. I am the wrong gender, so I can only paraphrase, observe, or validate her feelings.
The other time you can’t use identification is when customers say things that cross your boundaries. If an upset customer says he would like to shut down your business, you can’t say, “Sure thing, I would like to see it shut down too!” (Sadly, I have seen employees respond this way.) Instead, you should dial all the way back to observation: “You are obviously pretty upset with us. Let’s talk about it.”
Used properly, identification is one of the most powerful ways to connect with a difficult customer. In particular, if someone is openly angry, you should go for this highest rung of the ladder whenever possible. And in any situation, consider using it to create a bond with your customer.
“He Is Too Crazy to Reason With!”
Most people who have worked with the public long enough can tell you stories of customers they felt were “crazy”—not just difficult, or arrogant, or angry, but truly irrational. These are customers who have complaints that make no sense, or constantly ramble off topic, or get unusually agitated. They often make those who serve them feel helpless and frustrated.
According to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, serious mental illness occurs in approximately 5 percent of the population, and as high as 8 percent in population subgroups such as teenagers. Many of these people live and work in the community and are consumers like the rest of us. You can connect with them more often than you might think if you use the right approach. Here are three tips:
1. Don’t challenge. No one responds well to criticism, with or without mental illness. Telling people they make no sense usually just goads them to “explain” themselves further.
2. Refocus the discussion. Gently ask questions that focus on the customer rather than on the diatribe. “What could we do for you right now?” “What do you need?” “How are you doing today?” Often you will get a rational answer.
3. Acknowledge their better selves. When they do express a need or a legitimate feeling, acknowledge it. “Good choice.” “I can see why that is important to you.” “Absolutely, most people feel that way.”
How do I know these techniques work? Lots of personal experience. Speaking with mentally ill people on a regular basis as a crisis-line counselor, I found that this approach often turns rambling encounters into constructive dialogue because mentally ill people are still people, and they tend to respond to human kindness like anyone else. Just like your customers will.
Acknowledgment: Your Key to Handling Any Situation
The goal with all of these techniques is to show difficult customers that you “get” them. The main reason people behave the way they do when they are upset with us is because they think it will force us to see their view of the world. When we show that we understand their view—which is not the same as agreeing with them—there is often nothing to fight about. This is why good acknowledgment is the key to defusing situations and creating real dialogue.
But let’s be frank: Acknowledgment is controversial. It often feels like “kissing up” to people you totally disagree with. It certainly doesn’t feel natural to most of us. This is why the vast majority of the time, most people never do it—especially in their most difficult customer situations.
Here is why I want you to move past this speed bump: Good acknowledgment is one of the most powerful skills you can develop to connect with people. When first responders like police officers and hostage negotiators face critical situations, acknowledgment is the first club out of their bag. It is how psychotherapists get sullen, withdrawn teenagers to open up and talk in a way that their parents never can. And it is how you—and your whole team—become people who can handle any customer in any situation.
PUTTING LEARNING INTO PRACTICE
1. A customer storms up to you and declares, “Your crew did a terrible job of landscaping on my property. See how uneven this line of shrubs is? I’m going to tell all my neighbors to stay away from your company!” How might you paraphrase what she is saying?
2. How would you make an observation about what she is thinking and feeling?
3. What might you say to validate her feelings?
4. What could you say that would show her that you personally identify with her, in a way that doesn’t bash your employer?