CHAPTER 8
Grounding an
Angry Outburst
ANGER IS ONE OF OUR most powerful emotions. It is part of our survival instincts to defend ourselves and our loved ones against harm. But when a customer uses anger against you, it is one of the most uncomfortable experiences you will ever encounter in serving the public.
It is also a nearly universal experience in customer service. Each and every one of us has probably been an angry customer ourselves at some point, and if you serve customers long enough, some of them will be angry with you too. Yet it happens rarely enough that we are often completely unprepared for it, and this in turn leads us to respond counterproductively.
No one likes to be on the receiving end of an angry outburst. But anger can be understood and managed in ways that ground its negative energy and move both parties toward productive dialogue. In this chapter, we outline a three-step process for lowering the heat: (1) choosing the highest level of acknowledgment possible, (2) asking assessment questions that “move toward the pain,” and (3) shifting the discussion from blame to problem solving. Learn these steps and you will have much more control in your very worst customer service situations.
Understanding Customer Anger
Many years ago, as I was wrapping up a training course with my own call-center team, one agent described a customer who was so rude and foulmouthed that she had actually reduced a couple of our employees to tears. Then, in one of the great ironies of my career, this same customer called in the middle of this conversation. I bravely offered to take the call, and soon people were gathered around my cubicle watching Mr. Customer Service Training gasping for air under a torrent of abusive language that would make a sailor blush.
This was not a comfortable situation for me. It probably would not have been comfortable for you either. Yet because I knew what to say and what to do in these situations, within five minutes the customer and I were talking rationally, and within ten minutes we left the call as friends.
What happened in this call was typical of an interaction with a very angry customer. She came into the transaction extremely frustrated and felt that the only way she would get what she wanted was to intimidate me. So she started out by letting me have it with both barrels.
At this point, most people would react by treating this person as an enemy to be contained. They would set boundaries, tell the customer to calm down, or perhaps not react at all. The customer would then probably ramp up the assault, and the dance would continue until both parties were exhausted and upset. This transaction would likely end with one person winning and the other person losing.
This approach usually creates exactly the opposite reactions from what you want. When a customer’s anger triggers a negative reaction from you, the customer attacks even harder to make sure you “get it.” If such customers eventually win, they learn that this kind of behavior works. If they lose, they probably believe they should have stood their ground even more.
In my case, I responded the way I am about to teach you. I let her know that I was hearing both the situation and her anger. I did not judge her or her behavior. I asked questions designed to gather information and calm her down at the same time. Then I framed possible solutions around what she was looking for. As we went through this process, the customer’s mood changed progressively from upset to civil and productive, and we eventually reached a solution that let both of us win.
This is the kind of outcome I want you to have with your worst customers. It was the result of a planned performance that worked as expected. Let’s look at the steps that go into this performance and see how to put it to work with your own angry customers.
Step 1: Use the Highest Acknowledgment Level Possible
In Chapter 3, we talked about the “ladder of acknowledgment” and its four levels: paraphrasing, observation, validation, and identification. Most of the time, different customers and situations call for different levels of acknowledgment.
When a customer is enraged, however, this logic goes completely out the window. There are many reasons why customers are unhappy, but only one reason they become angry: They do not feel heard. They feel voiceless and powerless, and respond by puffing themselves up and confronting you until you pay attention to them. So you must head straight for the highest level of the ladder you can: Either identify with them or at the very least validate them.
This means that the first step in calming down upset customers is likely the very last thing you feel like doing: acknowledging them as deeply and with as much gusto as possible. Here’s an example:
Customer: I am absolutely furious with this stupid product! This is the third time it has broken down and I have had to come back! What is the matter with you people?
Not-so-good response (defensive): Please calm down, sir!
Not-so-good response (paraphrasing): So your product broke down again.
Not-so-good response (observation): I can see you are very angry.
Better response (identification): Wow, three times! That would bother me too! Let’s take a closer look at this.
Customer: I tried to get a refund on this, and your clerk was so rude to me! I am really upset right now.
Not-so-good response (defensive): Well, ma’am, we do have a no-refund policy.
Not-so-good response (paraphrasing): So you weren’t happy about the way you were treated.
Not-so-good response (observation): This obviously bothered you.
Better response (validation): No one wants to feel disrespected, so I am really glad you are letting me know. Please tell me more about what happened.
See what a difference your response can make here? Here, your level of acknowledgment (identification or validation), your language (responding in detail), and your tone (matching the customer’s level of urgency) all play a role in creating an effective response. Be right there with the customers in their anger, no matter how much you agree or disagree with them, and watch most of these situations start to calm down.
Finally, do not underestimate the impact of your own feelings at this stage. Anger from customers often feels frightening and inappropriate, particularly if they start out angry with no provocation from you. Every fiber of your being will want to withdraw, fight back, or defend yourself. And each of these self-protective behaviors will only make the other person angrier. Your best defense? Learn and practice what to say long before your next angry encounter, so that the right words will be there when you need them.
The Vengeful Customer
After a dealer failed to fix his expensive imported sports car—reportedly damaging it further in the process—a man in China subsequently felt he received no satisfaction from either the dealer or the car’s manufacturer. So he decided to take his frustrations out in public. In front of a large crowd, with news cameras rolling to capture the event, a hired crew of men in blue jumpsuits took sledgehammers to the car and destroyed it.
He is far from alone. A 2011 New York Times article described someone who wasn’t happy about his wedding photographers’ missing the last fifteen minutes of his ceremony and, according to this customer, yelling at him when he called to complain about it. So he sued the photographers to re-create the entire wedding ceremony, at a cost of $48,000—despite the fact that he and his bride are now long divorced. And even if these photographers win in court, they have lost: Their legal bills have now topped $50,000, more than they would have paid to settle the suit.
These are examples of people who flip the switch from being unhappy customers to being vengeful ones. Others express their displeasure by creating anti-corporate websites or viral videos on YouTube, or by launching class-action suits. Many businesses dismiss these customers as simply being unappeasable. But it is rarely the case that you have no control over their existence. Here are some common denominators you will often find among customers who fight back:
They are reacting—sometimes overreacting—to a legitimate grievance. One elderly woman became a folk hero of sorts by going to her cable company and smashing its office equipment with a hammer. This wasn’t a case of someone forgetting to take her Prozac; she had repeatedly gotten nowhere requesting service and decided to take matters into her own hands. And she was more than happy to be interviewed about it afterward.
You humiliated them. Most actions have an equal or greater reaction. When one social networking site banned a prominent blogger for twenty-four hours after she innocuously posted a picture that violated one of the site’s terms of service, she responded with a video of how unreachable and bureaucratic this site was for all five thousand of her fans to see.
You simply didn’t care. One professor had a bad flight experience on a long international trip. He repeatedly contacted the airline to complain and eventually received a response the airline itself later acknowledged was “slow, impersonal and insufficiently candid.” He respondedby starting a consumer website that aired grievances about this airline. It has existed for over fifteen years and gets up to thirty thousand hits per month.
So how do you prevent customers from taking public action against you? Here are some of the most important steps:
Do the right thing first. Look at your business through the eyes of your customers. If you have poor quality, insufficient redress for problems, or labyrinthine refund policies, then your most difficult customers will react the way you or I might—only more so.
Drop the insincere corporatespeak. If you reply to customers with stilted prose written by your lawyers or bean counters, such as, “We regret that we are unable to offer you a refund,” then vengeful customers are not a random accident—they are a likely occurrence. Be open, honest, and informal about your boundaries and the reasons for them, and most people will respect you.
Reach out to your critics. Provide solutions, or at least face-saving alternatives. Far too often, vengeful customers are reacting to being ignored as much as they are to being wronged.
Step 2: Ask Assessment Questions
Think about the last time you dealt with the police. Hopefully not in handcuffs, but rather the last time you suffered a break-in or auto accident, or needed some other kind of assistance. What do you remember most about that encounter?
When I ask audiences this question, most reply that the officer did a good job of calming everyone down. At the same time, most never really stopped to notice how they did this. The answer is that the officer probably did something good officers are trained to do: Ask good questions.
Good questions help turn an emotional situation into a factual one. They are particularly powerful in situations with upset customers because they move you toward the customer’s pain in a way that calms the customer down. Most important, it is a necessary next step toward troubleshooting the issue and shifting the discussion to problem solving.
So when are you ready to stop acknowledging someone and start asking good questions? As soon as the heat starts to drop, even a tiny bit. If you have ever been in a situation where you felt you did everything but stand on your head to help a customer who just got angrier, chances are very good that you did not acknowledge that person enough.
What are good questions to ask? Anything that moves you and the customer toward a solution. And what are bad questions to ask? Anything that challenges the customer or sounds insincere. Here are some general guidelines.
Take a Learning Posture
People often feel that their job with difficult customers is to challenge the customers’ perceptions. We ask them questions designed to convince them that they didn’t read our directions, follow our rules, or remember our policies. But to calm people down, you need to turn this objective around 180 degrees and try to learn from them. Here are some examples:
(Customer feels your product stinks.) “Sounds like you had a terrible experience. What kinds of things fell short for you with this product?”
(Customer is furious after waiting on hold for a half hour.) “That is a really long time! How did you get treated once you finally got through? Were we able to take care of the problem?”
(Customer is upset with how she was spoken to.) “I am so glad you are sharing this with me. No one wants to feel talked down to. Would you be comfortable with sharing exactly what our person said that made you feel disrespected?”
Ask them things like how they experienced the situation, what they tried to do first, and what they feel should have happened. You are not judging or agreeing at this stage—just putting yourself in their shoes and gathering information.
Never Ask “Why?”
Questions that begin with “Why” are not really questions: They are confrontations with question marks at the end of them. They never favor the customer and never move you closer to a solution. Never ask upset customers why they did or did not do something; instead, explore how they feel and what they want.
Get Specific
The best questions gather data that move you toward a solution while showing interest in the situation. This means that details are your friend. When did this happen? How long were they waiting? What kinds of things happened when they first tried to get help? The more you know, the better. And the more you can respond appropriately to this information (“Wow, that was a long wait”), better yet.
A more subtle point about good questions is that they put time and space between you and the customer’s anger, allowing both sides to calm down and negotiate a solution. Don’t just ask questions for the sake of asking them—people can see through that. Good questions, however, can be one of the best weapons in your arsenal for defusing a bad situation.
Step 3: Shift the Discussion
Once you have acknowledged someone enough for the heat to drop, and asked good questions to clarify the customer’s position, you can now try to shift the discussion from anger to constructive problem solving.
Here you follow the same process outlined in Chapter 6: Clarify what they want, respond with what you can do rather than what you can’t do, create incentives for accepting your solution, and respond to their objections. Here is an example of how this might play out with a very angry customer, including the earlier steps of acknowledging and asking good questions:
Customer: Tonight was our twenty-fifth anniversary, and this was the most horrible meal we have ever had! The waiter was rude, the food was cold, and it took more than an hour to serve us. We are beyond upset right now.
You: (acknowledgment and good questions) Wow! I can’t believe that so many things went wrong for you on such a special occasion. I feel terrible about this, and I really appreciate your letting me know. Could you tell me what you both ordered?
Customer: I had the porterhouse steak, and my wife had chicken cordon bleu. My steak was practically raw, and her chicken was so cold that the cheese inside wasn’t even melted.
You: That is horrible! I am also concerned about how the waiter treated you. Would you be comfortable sharing what went wrong there?
Customer: You bet. When I confronted him about our dinners, he muttered something about a new cook and disappeared on us. Then when he came back and we asked him to take these dinners off the bill, he had a bad attitude and told us we would have to talk to the manager. So here we are.
You: (assess what they want) It sounds like practically nothing went right here tonight, and on your twenty-fifth anniversary no less. What could we do to make this right for you?
Customer: I’ll be totally honest. This has ruined such an important special occasion, I am thinking of seeking compensation in small claims court and letting the local newspaper’s food reporter know about this as well. I feel you people should be out of business.
You: (acknowledge and respond with what you can do) If this were my twenty-fifth anniversary, I would be that angry too. You have the right to do whatever you feel you need to do. But since my name is on this restaurant, I would love the chance to try again and give you both the kind of evening you were planning on.
Customer: Well, you didn’t do a very good job this time. Plus I’m probably getting your whole staff in trouble here.
You: (respond to objections and create incentives) Absolutely, we did fall down tonight, and I want to apologize to both of you for that. And of course I am going to talk to our team. Don’t worry, no heads are going to roll, but moments like these help me teach people how to do things the right way. So here is my proposal. Forget tonight’s bill. Pick another date sometime this month, call me personally, and let us try again to create a very special evening for the two of you. It will be on the house, and it will be our pleasure.
Customer: All right, then. We’ll think about it. Thank you for listening to us.
A lot of important things went on in this discussion. First, the customer’s anger was heard and acknowledged. Second, the restaurant owner showed an interest in the specifics of what happened. Third, the owner focused on a solution. But what is just as important is what didn’t happen in this discussion: There were no excuses, and there was no defensiveness or pushback, even when the customer threatened the manager. This manager avoided all of these things precisely because none of it would have worked.
This is the heart and soul of defusing a difficult conflict. Keep your focus on the customer, find the core of reasonableness in the customer’s frustration, and work with the customer to co-create a satisfactory solution. In this case, the manager has probably prevented a court date and lots of bad publicity for the price of a couple of dinners. And in the general case, skills like these will help you walk safely into—and out of—your worst customer service situations.
When you are trying to keep someone from becoming upset and you have few options to work with, one tool will often save the day: the LPFSA.
The what?
The LPFSA: the Low Probability Face-Saving Alternative. It is an option you offer the customer that (1) has a low probability of being successful, but (2) addresses the customer’s agenda and allows him or her to save face.
Does this sound disingenuous to you—or to the customer? Not as much as you might think, as long as you frankly inform the customer of its low probability up front.
A perfect example of the LPFSA came up a few years ago when I went to a major league baseball park during a business trip. It was a perfect Sunday afternoon: sunny, 70 degrees, Father’s Day weekend, and the home team was a game out of first place. I did not know it as I pulled into the parking lot, but the game was sold out. Here is what I was told when I went up to the ticket window:
“It’s a beautiful day for baseball, and we would love to see you get into the game today. Even though we are completely sold out, here is what we would like to suggest. Our season ticket holders have a tradition of dropping off extra tickets they aren’t using at the gates, and if we have any, we give these away for free. I can’t make any guarantees, especially this close to game time, but if you don’t mind checking the other gates, it would be great if we could still get you in.”
I checked at each gate: no extra tickets, but everyone was as polite and helpful as the person at the ticket window. Eventually it struck me: I had just spent twenty minutes circumnavigating the ballpark, a distance of several city blocks. I had no ticket to the game. I was walking back to my car. And largely because of how I was treated (and, I found out later, how this team’s employees were trained), I was not feeling the least bit unhappy!
Here are some other examples of an LPFSA in action:
The doctor is booked solid, but you put patients on a list for an earlier appointment if someone cancels.
Someone gets a parking ticket, and you offer the option of appealing it by mail.
You offer to refer a situation to your manager for a decision.
Used properly, the LPFSA gives customers something of value for their efforts—the hope of a possible solution. More important, it allows you to use the language of an ally to calm them down.
Working in the Red Zone
Our natural reaction to a customer’s fury is to become frightened and defensive. I want you to have a different reaction: confidence. When you learn and use skills like these, you can truly defuse angry customer situations with the skill of a bomb squad. This confidence, in turn, will almost always carry over to your customer.
At the same time, know your limits. Communicating well in the face of customer rage takes practice. You should also be aware that the gravity of some situations will overwhelm even your best communications skills. For example, if I were to rush to the hospital after learning my wife was in an accident and was told that I would have to wait for visiting hours, there is nothing anyone could say that would keep me—or most of us—from getting angry. There is no shame in calling for help when you need it.
Chapter 19 examines what to do when situations truly start getting out of hand. It covers important techniques ranging from calling for backup to keeping yourself safe. But with the right skills, most of us need never get to that point. Anger is something you and your entire team can learn from, work with, and master—and when you do, the benefits for you, your customers, and your career are incredible.
PUTTING LEARNING INTO PRACTICE
1. You are a hospital administrator, and a mother is furious about her son’s treatment: the delays, the pain, the lack of communication. How should you respond?
2. One of your home-remodeling clients calls, enraged that your crew accidentally shattered a prized stained glass window at her house. This situation was totally your fault. How do you respond?
3. A woman is very angry about her lawn mower breaking down again. After you have asked a few questions, it is clear to you that she is misusing it on terrain it was never intended for. Nonetheless, she feels the problem is your fault. What do you say?