CHAPTER EIGHT

Developing Mental Fortitude

Any person who deals with demanding customers isn’t entirely helpless. Multiple techniques that influence the communication exchange positively can be learned. I’ve used dozens of them myself. You can find thousands of techniques that will have an impact and, if learned well, can work in almost every possible type of confrontation with a customer. The challenge is learning them and then deciding when you are in the heat of an attack to apply them before your emotions take over and you revert to mirroring customers’ negativity back to them. Most techniques are easier to use if you understand and focus on the foundation on which a technique is based. These mental-fortitude foundations are as follows:

Avoid Taking Complaints Personally

Fortitude is a good word to use when talking about complaints. A fort, the root word of fortitude, is a solid foundation from which to build strength. It would be much easier if we didn’t have to deal with adverse complaints and instead solved problems for customers, but that’s not our reality. Fortitude means facing any difficulties with strength— both mental and emotional. It means staying in power—that is, not leaving a confrontation when you need to stand your ground and be bold. Some people have had this capacity since they were young. We can all develop it, but when someone is yelling at us, fortitude is not the word that comes to mind.

Fortitude is not just keeping a positive mental attitude, though that may help. The kind of grit I am talking about is also taking care of yourself so you don’t get emotionally wiped out. It’s having a clarity of purpose about what you are doing. This kind of grit will enable you to not take your stress home with you in the evening. An easy way to remember these four capabilities of fortitude is to think of the word fort.

A fort, of course, is a fortified place the military uses where people can barricade themselves and remain safe. My preference is to think of an emotional fort as a place to go to keep you focused and strong, where you can set up to plan your next best steps. Emotional fortitude is about not letting the outside world diminish your strength. With that in mind, the first building block of our fort is to not take attacks personally.

Angry customers aren’t angry about you, even though it may feel that way. They don’t know you. They’re focused on their situation, which happens to be where you are standing. If you concentrate on what is happening at that moment, you can avoiding thinking about yourself. You have no idea what your customers may have faced in their lives that day, week, month, or their entire life—and you don’t need to know either. Just assume they are dealing with something difficult. They don’t know how to manage their emotional flow and are just letting it out on you.

Years ago, I took a hike with friends. We followed a path into farmland when an angry elderly man suddenly appeared with a shotgun aimed directly at us, less than a hundred yards away. He yelled. We all instantly froze. I stopped breathing. I remember desperately wanting to run and hide.

One of our group had been born and raised on a farm in the region. She was the smallest of us, yet she walked right up to him and said, “Hi, now put the gun down. We aren’t going to hurt you.” She got up incredibly close to him and began to talk with him. I was stunned. I had no idea what he said to her, but he put his shotgun down, a weapon looking as big as a bazooka to me. After a while, he started to laugh. I know she asked about his fields and apologized for walking on the path. They shook hands. She turned back to us, and we did everything we could to stroll away.

She told us he looked like all the older men she had grown up around, and she recognized his posturing as fear. I looked at her and thought, “Boy, I want to have that kind of fortitude in situations I face.” She evaluated the situation and knew it wasn’t inherently dangerous. A different emotion was present in the man—fear and not hostility—and she knew what to do. She said when she saw the gun come up and point at us, she focused on just one thing: how to address his fear. This focus enabled her to walk right up to that gun. She didn’t take the potential danger of the situation personally.

This is our first fortitude technique, which is present in the Japanese aikido discipline. If you have ever studied martial arts, you probably know something about aikido. Some of the best aikido practices are built around not resisting, looking at the world with “soft eyes,” and going with the flow. Years ago, I attended an aikido workshop led by George Leonard, famous in the 1970s in the human-potential field. He demonstrated the concept of soft eyes, a technique still used widely today. It involves looking around the periphery of your vision, taking in everything without focusing specifically on what is directly in front of you. By doing this, Leonard said, you maintain awareness without the intense judgment that usually accompanies your focus on an immediate visual field. The judging we do with “hard eyes” happens without our noticing we are judging—and it affects our behaviors and emotions. Looking with soft eyes is a combination of a relaxed approach with alertness. Today, we would call this mindfulness.

Japanese samurai warriors learned how to cultivate a full 360 degrees of awareness, demonstrating vision mastery by taking on multiple attackers from all directions. Both magical and easy to understand, the technique of soft eyes has been adapted by numerous groups. For example, in the book Zen Driving, readers are introduced to using soft eyes while driving.¹ The idea is to achieve a relaxed mental state while looking at the road without explicitly focusing on the traffic immediately in front of you. You can make better decisions about your next best move in challenging traffic conditions when you do this. When cars are speeding by you in all directions, driving in traffic can produce much the same feeling as being frozen in place in front of an angry customer and perhaps others waiting in line to talk with you. With customers, maintaining a soft focus enables you to see everything around you, listening to everything, observing, analyzing, but not judging or getting caught up in an emotional state.

If you are relaxed, you can decide your most appropriate next move. In this state, your customer is less likely to become your opponent but will instead work in harmony with you to find the best solution. Your brain remains open to multiple possibilities always present in a customer-service situation. Maintaining this soft focus keeps you calm, which can spread to others in the same space. When you look with hard eyes, you tend to miss a lot that is going on.

Criminal prosecutors know eyewitnesses to crimes are often not reliable. The reason is they are likely to have focused on one item (the scary, risky part of the situation) and missed everything else. If you have seen the video “How Many Times Does the White Team Pass the Ball?” you know when watching it the first time, you are so focused on counting how many times the ball is passed that you miss the gorilla walking right through the group.² Handling a complex complaint with anger involved always has more than one thing going on simultaneously.

Be Aware of Both Your and Your Customer’s Emotions

Once you have built your fort, there are a few techniques to try while in there. Be aware of your own emotions—a foundational method. Don’t cover your feelings; instead stay in touch with them. Your feelings are real, and attempting to cover them will mostly make them grow in intensity. To be aware of your emotions, you must, at a minimum, be able to name them.

Unfortunately, many people do not distinguish between judgments and feelings. For example, many people will say they feel “fine” if asked how they feel. “Fine” is not a feeling. It’s a judgment about a feeling. Emotional-intelligence experts say feelings guide us to what is essential to think about in our situation. You may say you feel fine when you are feeling nervous. What does nervousness physically feel like? The word feel can give us a clue; it’s physical.

Let’s look at the feeling of anger since we will likely observe it in both our customers and ourselves. What does it feel like? Everyone has their precise way of feeling anger. Still, some of the common physical feelings include rapid heartbeat, physical heat, sweaty palms, clenched fists, squinty eyes, churning stomach feeling, tense muscles, and trembling. Once you notice these physical effects, you can then acknowledge feeling angry. The more information you have about your situation, the better you can identify emotions, particularly primary ones.

Primary emotions include fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and surprise. Some psychologists include contempt as a primary feeling as well, but you can see the list is not long. Once you label your feeling as anger, you use a different part of your brain than where your feelings are located. You are moving from your emotional brain to your cognitive brain, from your feeling mind to your thinking mind.

If you notice you are feeling angry (remember all the symptoms listed above), know that your customer can likely sense your anger as well. Humans are good at recognizing emotions in others, maybe even better than sensing them in ourselves. For example, we can usually sense when friendliness and joy have left the room and anger has moved in. Ask yourself what customers are likely to feel when they sense that you are feeling anger or disgust. They certainly won’t be in the mood to give you a well-wrapped gift. There are several ways to relieve or reduce the specific emotion you might be feeling that don’t involve suppressing your feelings.

One of the best steps is take in a deep breath of air and let it out slowly. If you let anger dominate your cognitive brain, you are likely to withdraw attention from your customers, stop smiling, and start sulking. You might even be tempted to tell customers you can’t help them if they are going to remain angry. That only begets more anger, and then your anger is driving theirs.

Use cognitive reframing to help you accept your anger without letting it control you. For example, remind yourself you are receiving a gift. Dissatisfied customers want to fix their situation, and if you succeed in helping them, they will likely end up more loyal and grateful to you. You’ll be able to end these exchanges with some degree of friendliness. It calls to mind the powerful quote reportedly by Akshay Dubey, a certified mountaineer and head of Eccentric Outdoors adventure magazine: “Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls your life.”

We all suffer from emotional gaps in the early parts of our lives. We still haven’t completely developed our emotional intelligence in our twenties, which unfortunately is when so many service providers enter the field. We know more about our emotions in our thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. Older people are generally more effective at complaint handling because they know themselves better.

Clear Your Mind after Receiving a Problematic Complaint

The third foundation of mental fortitude is the commonsense idea that your mind will be better able to handle a new situation if it is clear from your last difficult complaint.

Letting go of a complaint means to stop dwelling on it. If you build a fort around yourself and keep the complaint outside your fort, it’s less likely to spread throughout the rest of your day and evening. You can clear your mind by doing a different task. Stand up if you are sitting and walk away, take a breath of air, and consciously shake the encounter out of your body and mind. You may think this is impossible to do, but it’s not.

Athletes are masters of this technique and do it all the time. From the beginning of their athletic development, they are coached to let go of immediate past plays and instead focus on what is coming up next. Suppose basketball players keep thinking about intentional elbow bumps by other players that weren’t caught by referees. As a result, they were not awarded free throws. If they stay focused on the elbow knocks, they would never see the perfect throw coming toward them that could easily be put in the basket. Basketball players get lots of practice at this every time they play a game or are practicing. You have these opportunities as well as a complaint handler or problem solver if you recognize them as such.

Every new customer is the equivalent of a new experience on the playing field of complaint handling. You need to be ready for each one, which requires letting go of the previous situation. If you don’t do this, by the end of the day, the 20 to 30 percent of the time you are annoyed with challenging customers begins to bear down on your mental stamina, exhausting you after a day’s work. And your next customer is going to get some of the side effects of your last interaction as well.

You can take several small steps to let go of a bad encounter. Imagine the anger from the customer as coming at you in full force. You don’t have to let it hit your body. Visualize strong negative emotions coming at you, move one of your shoulders back a little, and watch the bundle of negativity soar right on by you. You can even turn your head and watch the negativity move off into the distance. Some people use a simple mantra like “Let it go” and then begin to engage once again. You have a choice. Don’t demand an apology after customers are nasty to you. That’s on their shoulders. You can’t control their reactions, in any case, so don’t get snide and say, “Well, the least you could do is apologize.” Yes, that would be good, but they’re not obligated to. Just let it go. You don’t own it unless you choose to.

One day, while teaching a stress-resiliency program to a corporate audience, I realized I needed another action in addition to saying “Let it go.” I needed a significant break between my work and home life. Engineers who designed the first submarines came to mind. They invented an escape hatch so when the submarine was submerged and divers needed to exit, they could do so without sinking the submarine. They would go inside the so-called escape hatch and close the door to the submarine’s interior. They would then open the door to the ocean, allowing water to come into the escape hatch, which would allow them to move into the water once the hatch was filled. The steps were reversed for getting back into the submarine.

If you can compartmentalize your work life from your home life, you can keep those customers in one part of your life from impacting your personal life. Many people have told me they go home wiped out, carrying nasty customers in their minds. You need an escape hatch, or corridor, between your work and home. Imagine the escape hatch sitting between the water and the submarine—or the interactions between your customers and your personal life. A corridor is not a physical space, but anything you do at either the tail end of your workday or the beginning of your home life to create that escape hatch will help. It will keep the two parts of your life separate. The hatch needs three characteristics:

You can build in escape hatches within your workspace if you work in a call center. When you need to place distance between a difficult customer interaction and emotional relief, locate a space in your building so you have an escape hatch to visit. You can step away from that difficult encounter to a safe place, regroup, and return with fortitude. The more you practice this technique, the less time you’ll need to spend in your escape hatch.

Learn from Difficult Customer Interactions

The foundation for this technique is that we can learn from difficult customer interactions, even when we need to get away from what is happening around us. But that isn’t the only benefit we can receive from a break. If you have had a complicated interaction, seek out someone to talk to about it. I’ve worked with companies who have regular “Let’s Break and Talk” sessions, sometimes at the beginning of the day, other times over the lunch hour or at the end of the day. These give participants a chance to discuss their challenging interactions.

This type of exchange is a way for colleagues to say, “I had one of those angry calls yesterday, and here’s what I did. I assured the customer we didn’t communicate as clearly as we could have, and our team will discuss what happened so we don’t make that mistake again. It wasn’t perfect, but the customer said goodbye with sincere apologies about their anger. I thanked them again, and they were pleased when we hung up!”

Show Customers They Are Important to You

The foundation for this mental fortitude technique is to show customers they are important to you. Remember, you are receiving a gift—a complaint. As you begin your interaction with your customers, put an “I’m about to receive a gift” expression on your face and feel it in your body and voice. This will help you start your interaction with a nonverbal expression welcoming what they are about to say, and customers won’t likely become more nervous about what is going to happen next.

When customers register a complaint, they are nervous and typically show this with more energy in their voice and body. They are watching you hoping you will help them. Whether they are aware of it or not, they look carefully at all the nonverbal signals you send their way. Many people are aware of the idea attributed to Albert Mehrabian that 93 percent of our communication is nonverbal. This is a myth that leaves out the more important point Mehrabian made: our nonverbal signals carry more weight in our communication when they don’t line up with what we say. For example, if you say, “How can I help you?” with a frown on your face, the customer will automatically place greater weight on the frown and tone of voice being communicated rather than the helpful phrase.³

Congruence in what we say and how we say it is a huge portion of the message we make. That’s why simply putting a smile on your face doesn’t mean you are a friendly person who will help your customer. But a genuine smile helps in a nerve-racking situation where nonverbal signals are critical. It’s why smiles are essential. Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, in a classic text, indicate nonverbal components, particularly in service interactions, tend to stand out because emotions are so dominant. Emotions can tell us whether danger is around us since we are primarily dealing with strangers.⁴

Other eminent scholars say nonverbal communication reveals true intentions and nonverbal communication is central to the communication of feelings.⁵ It’s not about just pasting a smile on your face. It’s letting your entire delivery approach be imbued with the A Complaint Is a Gift mindset: “You’re important to me, I know you, and I’m going to do everything I can to help you because you’re about to give me a gift!” This communication works with standard service delivery, and it works especially well when handling a complaint. Let’s consider three signals that will display that the customer has significance to you.

First Signal: You’re Important to Me

If your customers know they are important to you, you automatically stand on a firmer foundation. One way to show customers are important to you is to listen carefully. It’s an enormous part of empathy. A way to show you are listening is by taking notes. If you are more likely to be focused on problem-solving rather than paying attention to the people you are helping, you can change the emphasis of your service by adding in a dose of empathy. When your customers can’t see you, tell them you’re taking notes as they speak, so you can remember what they say.

I recently had interactions with two Apple service technicians. I saw the notes taken on my initial calls with them after I was passed up to more-experienced technicians. One set of notes was so brief and sketchy I had to repeat everything. The second set of notes took time to read, but everything was notated—everything. Guess which technician I believed was providing the best help—and he did. If a friend has saved letters you sent years ago, how important do you think you are to them compared to someone who immediately throws your letters in the trash? When dealing with a complaint, definitely don’t multitask while you listen, such as responding to email or finishing paperwork from a previous call. Customers can sense when you are not focused on them. Let them know they are significant to you.

If you believe it, tell them they are important to you. Everyone likes to hear that, especially when a service failure has occurred. Remember that empathy is the “psychological superglue that connects people.”⁶ Another way to tell customers they are important to you is to show personal disappointment when there has been a failure. Don’t just tell them you are sorry for the inconvenience. Show empathy, which means you let them see you would also be upset or disappointed if this had happened to you.

Second Signal: I Know You

Another signal telling customers they are important is to indicate you know them. One effective way to communicate knowledge is by pacing—mirroring their reactions and creating a connection by demonstrating you understand them and their needs. Pacing in communication typically refers to the speed at which words are spoken or any other auditory expression such as tone or volume. Mirroring specifically refers to adapting to posture, breathing, and facial expressions, among other physical attributes. In reality, these two concepts are used interchangeably. When pacing or mirroring, you get in step with someone. Customers will see a reflection of themselves. Both pacing and mirroring are tools to create rapport. When people are in rapport with each other, they are more forgiving and accepting. With customers, you create a connection by demonstrating you understand them and their needs. They look at or listen to you, and they see or hear someone who looks like themselves. If customers see someone who seems to be feeling the same emotions they are experiencing, they will unconsciously accept you know them. Sara Hodges, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, encourages mindfulness. She says, “Paying attention to other people allows you to be moved by their experiences.”⁷

You can pace factual information by repeating something your customers believe is true. For example, if they report the goods they ordered arrived late, you can easily repeat, “Thank you for letting me know. I’m sorry your package arrived late.” Emotional pacing is done simultaneously while talking or listening and by mirroring body language or word usage. If your customers look distressed, this is not the time for a big smile. Instead, a look of concern will pace them. This way, you mirror their emotions back to them and show you understand and know what they are going through. If you consciously pay attention to pacing your customers, you will take charge of the emotional content of the exchange. Showing empathy will help pace customers: “This is really too bad. I can only imagine how you feel.”

Many young employees don’t do this automatically with customers for some reason. We learn emotional skills in our families and with our friends, starting as young as a little over one year old, so we’ve been pacing and mirroring people our entire lives. It’s possible that some CSRs don’t use these signals because they think that personal skills don’t belong in the work environment. Managers need to praise empathetic behavior when they see it practiced, and they should make direct statements about how important empathy and pacing are.

A different kind of pacing is required if customers believe someone in the business made a mistake and didn’t place the order to arrive on time. When this happens, customers are more likely to feel anger, disgust, and blame. Any language suggesting you will take care of the issue will persuade the customer they will be taken care of: “Thank you for letting me know. This shouldn’t have happened. I’m very sorry, and I’m going to do everything I can to make this right.” Tell them you will go out of your way to do something—even if it turns out they made a mistake when placing the order. Don’t blame others (“Those people in shipping!”) in your company. Just get to work fixing the problem.

If you focus on using language to signify you are in partnership and understand what customers are dealing with, it will be easier to get them to cooperate with you. Together as partners, both of you are battling against the complaint—that is, the problem. One way to do this is through friendliness and remembering customers’ names. When a team of people and I worked with the crews on Viking ocean cruises, we spent two days teaching and demonstrating nonverbal cues, especially friendliness. I walked around the ship and took pictures of the crew at work. They always had big smiles on their faces and made firm eye contact. Then I assembled these pictures into a slide show and showed them their faces. Their images made the point. They loved looking at their smiling faces, and no doubt the guests did too. Throughout the ship, passengers who interacted with multiple departments felt the friendliness aboard. Passengers rarely got annoyed in this atmosphere of goodwill. When the crew made small mistakes, most passengers excused them. After all, these mistakes couldn’t possibly be the fault of the helpful, smiling crew!

Another way to pace communication is to be alert to different communication styles. I will mention this topic only briefly because this subject is lengthy and complex. You can learn to notice clues that suggest customers are focused on getting something done; they want it done as fast as possible and want to be in control. You can also learn to recognize the opposite style that is more concerned about the connection they are making with you; they typically are polite and hint rather than tell you what to do. A third group has a lot of energy; they are animated and don’t like being bored. They want you to pay attention to them—with energy. The final group is more focused on precision and quality. They dislike mistakes and not getting enough information. On the A Complaint Is a Gift website, you will find a self-assessment. Attending a workshop about communication styles may be one of the easiest ways to learn the art of pacing. It helps avoid rubbing up against a style in a negative way. Once you get the hang of it, you can get quite good at picking out these styles and pacing them. Our CIAG Train the Trainer program includes communication styles training. You can find information on our web page.

Third Signal: I’m Going to Do Everything I Can to Help You

When I make a complaint, become upset, and then hear a service provider indicate they are going to do something, my head of steam dissipates. “Why should I be angry with them?” I ask myself. “They are trying to help me. I should cooperate with them.” I doubt everyone does that, but most people have their self-interests at heart when complaining. They want something done, and if they think it will happen, they tend to become cooperative. Unless customers are totally out of control, your saying you will help them will settle them down.

When Moshe Davidow examined the National Customer Rage studies, he focused on how frequently bad complaint handling happens: 50 percent of respondents said they never received an answer to their complaints. They had to reach out three and a half times to solve anything. Davidow concluded companies are throwing millions of dollars into a sinkhole because they aren’t implementing service recovery adequately.⁸

Many customers don’t expect more than poor complaint handling when they have a problem, so they might show up with a chip on their shoulder. But what if they get “I’ll do everything I can to help” in response? Would they likely come in with a more receptive attitude and probably receive better service from the service provider? The foundation for this technique has to do with emotional contagion. This is the tendency for people to get infected with each other’s emotions. When someone gets furious around you, it’s hard not to react. Contagious emotions can be negative, but they can also be positive. If someone says to you, “I’ll do everything I can to help you,” the contagious emotion you pick up is positive. The contagion may be unconscious, but it nonetheless is felt.

The following example is part of Apple’s general service approach, but it also works well with complaint handling. Apple staff are told not to correct their customers. Technicians say, “Uh-huh” and “I understand,” to show they are listening. The Genius Bar teams say, “As it turns out,” not “unfortunately,” when giving bad news. They never correct customers’ pronunciation because it would sound patronizing. They say, “Let me see what I can do.” All this helps promote positive contagion and reduce negative contagion.⁹

I saw the use of “Let me see what I can do” while waiting for a Genius Bar technician to test my computer. I saw a young boy, around six years old, come up to the counter with his little hand stuck out holding an iPhone with a severely cracked screen. With a distressed look on his face, he looked at the Apple employee and said in a tiny, frightened voice, “I broke my iPhone. I dropped it.” Perhaps ten years old, his sister stood nearby with her hands on her hips and a disgusted look on her face. The mother didn’t look happy either. The Apple rep took the phone gently from the little boy’s hand and said, “Yup. It certainly did break. You know we don’t cover the iPhone when it’s broken like this. But let me see what I can do.” He stepped into a room behind the counter and disappeared. We stood there waiting for him to return. A few minutes later, he came out with a new iPhone in a beautifully packaged box. He handed it over to the little boy and said, “We’re going to do something special for you. We’re going to give you a new iPhone. Here it is. Maybe you should get a cover so if you drop it again, it won’t break.” That little boy practically jumped for joy, especially when he looked at his sister, who now looked envious. How many years do you think he’ll remember this as he moves through his life, probably with new Apple iPhones all along the way?

A middle-aged man next in line came up and handed over another iPhone, totally destroyed, with all sorts of electronic gadgets hanging from it, and said, “I ran over it with my car.” The Apple rep looked at it carefully and said, “Yup, it’s gone. We don’t cover iPhones that have been run over by cars, but let me see what I can do.” He returned to the back room. We stood there waiting. I was utterly intrigued. What was he going to do? He came out of the back room with another newly boxed iPhone and said, “Here’s what we can do. We’ll give you this new iPhone with a one-hundred-dollar deduction. Will that work for you?” Was the customer happy? Based on the big smile on his face, I’m sure he was. He knew it was his fault that he ran his car over his iPhone, but he just saved a hundred dollars in replacement fees.

Two things are going on in these examples. To make decisions like this, the Apple representative must have been empowered. I’m sure he didn’t check with any manager in the back room to see what he could do. He just went back there, stood around for a while, then picked up a newly boxed iPhone and took it out to the customer. It was theater! Two happy Apple users walked out of the store, likely customers for life. This type of response has probably contributed to how Apple became the first trillion-dollar company on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

If you listen carefully to the language used in these examples, you’ll see one way to create a contagious emotional moment is to use the language of partnership. This language helps enhance the feeling of reciprocity. If you have difficulty thinking of your own, try these:

Reciprocity means “I’ll do something for you, and you probably will do something in return for me.” When handling complaints, you fix customers’ problems, and hopefully they’ll come back and remain loyal. It’s an exchange of mutual benefit. Even though it’s not stated explicitly, it’s used in all our relationships. Our parents took care of us when we were infants and children, and we may have the opportunity to take care of them as they age. All our reciprocal relationships create a subconscious need to repay in kind.¹⁰ The Apple examples demonstrate both reciprocity and contagion: generosity begets generosity.

How to Say No and Still Retain Good Relationships

One of the most uncomfortable aspects of communication happens when CSRs are required to say no to customers or believe they should say no. It’s important to remember it’s not what gets resolved but rather how it gets resolved that matters in terms of whether customers will return to do business with you. It’s all in the way you say it. Sometimes you have to say no. The reaction you get from your customers, however, depends on how you say no, as indicated above. Here is one way to say no that involves six steps. It may look complicated, but if you notice how friends say no to each other, you will recognize these steps and can use them easily without thinking your way through them.

Here’s how it sounds when, let’s say, you’re telling the customer the item they want is not available in the color they want.

Oh. (Put an expression of regret on your face.) I wish we had that color you want. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I’m really sorry. We ran out of that color. It’s been out of stock since the first day. It’s been a very popular color, and now with the supply chain in trouble, we’re not going to get that color back in for at least another month. I am so sorry. But perhaps I could suggest this dark forest-green color. Two other women bought it when they couldn’t get the black color, and I just heard from them. They love it. You could try it, and if it doesn’t work for you, we’ll take it back with no shipping charge.

You can do a few other things too. Ask questions to find out if a no response is necessary. Maybe customers didn’t give you enough information to help them, or you don’t completely understand their needs. Remember, it’s not the no that evokes anger, it’s how it is said. Offer alternatives, but don’t make promises you can’t keep. Tell them what you will do, which could just be researching more to find out what is possible: “Let me see what I can do.” Let the person down gently, and tell them you don’t like saying no to them. To connect with empathy, ask yourself how you would feel if you heard a no. Remember, even if you’ve just had to tell ten people no on the last ten calls, this person is hearing your no for the first time.