CHAPTER 6
Powerful Problem
Solving: Beyond
“Yes We Can” and
“No We Can’t”
EVERY CRISIS HAS ITS ROOTS in an unsolved problem. Thus far in this book, we have focused on ways to help a difficult customer feel heard and understood. But that is not enough. At some point, the discussion must shift to the heavy lifting of solving the customer’s problem.
When customers confront us, our natural instinct is often to respond with our agenda, which in turn leads them to push back with their agenda. Or we may desperately throw out solutions and hope they will accept them. Sometimes this approach works, but often it leads to frayed tempers and escalating demands.
In this chapter, we outline a better way: a systematic, four-step approach for problem solving that involves clarifying the customer’s needs, framing your response around those needs, creating incentives for a mutual solution, and responding to objections. In the process, you will learn that negotiating a solution, even with a very difficult customer, has a structure you can learn and follow.
Step 1: Clarify the Other Person’s Needs
Try an experiment the next time you are out shopping: Listen to customers trying to get service. Any customers, in any situations. Pay particular attention to what the people who work at the stores say in response.
The vast majority of the time, you will hear a dialogue that goes something like this:
Customer: I want X.
Employee: We can’t do X. We can do Y instead.
Customer: But I want X.
Employee: Here’s why we can’t do X.
Most of the time, no one is being rude here. However, both parties are talking past each other. Neither is saying anything that speaks to the other’s agenda. The customer focuses on what he or she wants, and the employee is locked in on what the store can (or often can’t) do.
Most of the time, this dialogue works: The customer settles for Y and walks away. However, this approach is all but guaranteed to blow up in your face with your most difficult customers, and your most difficult situations, for one simple reason: The customer feels unheard. It isn’t just that you can’t do what the customer wants—it’s that you have responded, with the best of intentions, in a way that sounds like you aren’t listening and don’t care.
Here is how you can short-circuit this process: Clarify what they want. Take what they want and play it right back to them:
Customer: I demand the moon and the stars.
You: Of course. You are really frustrated, and you want the moon and the stars.
Have you agreed to give this customer the moon and the stars? Not yet. Maybe not ever. But first, you have told this customer that you heard his demands, his thoughts, and his feelings.
Here you can use any or all of the acknowledgment techniques we discussed in Chapters 2 through 5. The important thing is to clarify what customers are looking for and let them hear that first. That way you score a victory no matter what happens: Whether you can grant their wishes or not, they know you heard them. Then you are ready to move on to the negotiating phase.
Step 2: Frame Your Response
Now we get to the fun part: responding with what we can or cannot do.
If the answer is yes, you can do what the customer wants, of course this part is easy. And if the customer is a reasonable person who will accept pretty much whatever you say, this part is also easy. But when you can’t give difficult customers what they want, we normally take one of three common stances:
1. We simply say no to them: “I’m sorry, sir, but this is a fine restaurant. We cannot make you a hot dog.”
2. We try to “educate” them about why they shouldn’t want what they want: “If you had read all 15 pages of your service contract, sir, you would know that we do not cover damage caused by lightning.”
3. We try to convince them the problem is somehow their fault: “Sir, you can’t expect to get a full refund when you have already worn these pants for three weeks.”
The result of any of these three approaches? For most people, predictable unhappiness. And with our very worst customers, you had better bring your flameproof suit. But there is another approach, which leads us to what is perhaps the cardinal principle of effective problem solving: Lead with what you can do, not what you can’t do.
Take the customer’s needs, think about what you can acknowledge and what you can do, and leave the word can’t far out of the discussion.
You see, human nature always pulls us to focus on what we cannot do, so much so that it feels really funny to suggest a smaller thing we can do in response to a big customer demand. But because people process the words they hear before they process the meaning of the words, linguistics are much more important here than you realize. People respond much more positively to you when you use the language of an ally.
Here is an example with a patient who is demanding to be seen quickly by a physician:
Customer: I want this appointment as soon as possible. The waiting is killing me!
Not-so-good response: I’m afraid we are booking appointments a month from now at this point. That is the best we can do, unless we get a cancellation.
Better response: I don’t blame you for not wanting to wait. I’ll tell you what we can do: Even though it is about a four-week wait at this point, I would like to put you on the cancellation list to see if we can possibly get you in sooner.
See the difference language makes? In the first case, you are handing the patient a challenge; in the second, a small victory. More important, you are packaging the same outcome in a way that honors the interests of the customer.
Here is an easy-to-remember template for framing your solution around a customer’s need: “Because you [insert the customer’s agenda, whatever it is], I [insert what you can do, whatever it is].”
This language links what the customer wants to what you can provide. Make no mistake, the solution you offer is very important. At the same time, the act of linking this solution to the customer is often equally important. Compare these responses:
Customer: My flights have been delayed all afternoon. I demand an upgrade to first class!
Not-so-good response: I’m sorry, ma’am. Lots of people are in your situation today. You are still going to have to stand by like everyone else.
Better response: Because you had such a bad experience, I’m going to put you on the standby list for an upgrade.
Every difficult customer, and every difficult customer situation, ultimately has its roots in an agenda. This agenda may be spoken or unspoken. It may be reasonable or unreasonable. Either way, once you learn to understand the agenda, acknowledge it, and honor it in your response, you have your very best chance of solving things peacefully.
Yes, We Can Do the Impossible—for a Fee!
One of the great things about managing a call center is the ability to monitor phone calls and see how people are doing. One day, I listened in on a really tough call. A man had never been trained to use our complex software, and as a result he had made a mistake that was going to cost him hours of extra work to fix.
He was not happy about this. In fact, he felt that this was somehow our fault and was demanding that we fly someone to Chicago the next day to “fix everything.” When the agent handling the call politely tried to defer this, the customer demanded to speak with his boss—me. And I was more than happy to oblige, because it was a good learning moment for how to negotiate with a demanding but utterly wrong customer. Here were the three steps I followed:
1. Offer to help. I did not start with a defensive posture. Rather, I opened the conversation by politely using his name and asking what I could do to help him.
2. Focus on possibilities. When he predictably complained about our software and demanded that we fly someone to Chicago, I immediately replied, “We would be happy to do that for you. You should be aware that there is a lead time of three weeks for a site visit, and it costs about $3,000.” When he retorted that he did not want to spend $3,000, I was right there with him again. “Of course you don’t want to spend that kind of money. So let’s see what we can do to help you for free, right here on the phone.”
3. Sell the benefits. I did not tell this person that he should have gotten training—even though I would be completely right in saying so. That would accomplish nothing but tick off an already angry person. Instead, I focused on what a training intervention would do for him, now that he was already using our system, and he listened.
The results? I never said no to him. I never criticized him for being untrained. I did not fly anyone to Chicago. And my team got to observe a good example of defusing a very demanding customer.
Step 3: Create Incentives
Perhaps the most important step of the problem-solving process is to take your best solution and make it as attractive as possible for the customer. This will give you your very best chance of having this individual leave peacefully—and, hopefully, satisfied.
You may be thinking, “This is all well and good if you can somehow still make the customer happy. But what if your only options are not going to make that person happy at all?”
Let’s look at a friend of mine who was a campus police officer. One of her jobs was to take rowdy patrons at sporting events and kick them out of the arena. Not a lot of happiness there, right? But she could do it skillfully (and peacefully) by framing the situation as one that would still benefit the other person. Here is how she did it:
“Look, I know you’re here to have a good time. However, I am going to need you to leave for yelling obscenities. If you leave willingly you’ll preserve your dignity and be able to come back and enjoy games in the future. I would much prefer that over having you arrested and banned for the season. OK? Why don’t we walk out together and make it a good night.”
Now, hopefully, your own negotiations don’t involve asking people to leave with a Taser at the ready. But you can still do exactly what my friend did: Create an incentive for the other person to accept your solution. Here are some ways you can make this happen in your customer service situations:
Let Them Know They Are OK
If cops can make lawbreakers feel like reasonable people, you can do the same thing with your most demanding customers. Acknowledge the fact that most of us want whatever we can get, and want situations to go in our favor, and the other person is much more likely to listen to you. For instance: “Everyone wants the best deal possible.”
Contrast the Alternatives
Difficult customers often have a mindset that if they don’t get exactly what they had in mind, they won’t “win.” So your job here is to frame your best solution as the one that will help them the most. For example, “This discount is better than what we usually offer people.”
Paint a Better Future
Link your solution to a better experience in the future, and it will feel more like a victory to the customer. For example, “Next time you come to our restaurant, we can work with you to create a meal you will like better.”
At the end of the day, all of us want to feel like it is all about us. Frame your solutions in terms of WIIFM—what’s in it for me—and they will be much more likely to succeed.
Step 4: Respond to Objections
What happens when you acknowledge what customers want, make your very best offer, frame it to their interests—and they reply that it is totally unacceptable?
It would be delightful if upset customers would always simply accept what we propose and then walk away peacefully. Unfortunately, it does not always work that way. This is why they are difficult customers, right?
When customers object to our best offer, too many of us make a critical mistake: We start defending ourselves, restating our policies, or telling people why they should feel differently. All of these approaches have precisely the same effect: They make the customer even angrier.
Instead, continue to live where they live. Play their objections back to them. Hear them. Feel them. Accept how important they are for them. Then use these two transitional phrases to bring them back to earth: “I wish . . .” and “Even though . . .” For example:
“I realize you wanted to have this replaced for free. I wish I could do that. Even though I can’t, I am still willing to offer you a discount.”
These phrases move the conversation back from their problems to your solutions and offer customers at least a small victory while still maintaining your boundaries.
From there, a simple technique will often bring this standoff to a close. As you patiently acknowledge the customer’s dissatisfaction and restate your best offer, be prepared to repeat this three times. After pushing back twice against your offer, a customer will usually realize by the third time that you are serious and stop pushing. So keep your cool, patiently restate your position three times, and most of these situations will be resolved.
A New Way to Solve Problems
You may not realize you are doing this, but the vast majority of the time, most of us respond to pressure and unrealistic demands by trying to somehow paint the customer as “wrong.” Here, we propose a very different approach for solving problems: Accept the customer’s perspective, and then use language that approaches what the customer wants as best you can. This strategy gives you your very best chance of resolving the problem while keeping your boundaries intact.
If simply changing a few words could substantially lower the amount of pressure you feel, and the level of concessions you eventually make, would you do it? When you offer solution-focused responses that show you hear customers and want to do the best you can for them, they are much more likely to accept your solutions. Try it, and the process of negotiation will seem much less onerous to you.
PUTTING LEARNING INTO PRACTICE
1. Your valet parking attendant just dented a customer’s expensive car. The owner is demanding a brand new car, claiming that you “ruined” it and that it will never be right again. How do you respond?
2. A customer is complaining that he and his family were forced to sit in front of several loud, drunken fans at your ballpark, and is demanding a refund of everyone’s tickets. You have a no-refund policy. What would you say in response to his demands for a refund?
3. Someone insists on cutting ahead of a long line because she is in a rush. What could you say to her?
4. A young man was ordered to leave your store after shouting and cursing at your employees when he was refused a refund. Now his mother, who has only heard his side of the story, has come in demanding a formal apology. How might you first address her?