CHAPTER 7
Reframing Your
Message
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN, “I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to hold to speak to someone,” and, “I can connect you to the right person, and it should be just a short wait”? Words, and nothing more. More often than you think, when a customer situation goes south, the reasons are often as simple as the words you chose.
When customers are not happy, language is often the sugar that helps the medicine taste better. Used properly, the right words can make situations sound reasonable, options seem more palatable, and warring parties become allies. They can encapsulate good intentions and customer benefits. Above all, they can calm people down.
In this chapter, we explore the art and science of reframing: choosing words that defuse situations and make solutions more attractive. Good reframing is not disingenuous, like the real estate agent who describes a small, dumpy apartment as “cozy.” Rather, it puts situations in a context that helps people make rational and often face-saving choices, particularly in a customer crisis. Here we will explore the good and bad uses of reframing, and how to use it for common difficult customer situations.
How Reframing Works
In the United States, most people would rather call just about anyone but the Internal Revenue Service. So when, after filing my tax return one year, I discovered I had made a mistake on it, I was not happy about contacting them. But when I did, the agent said something that put me immediately at ease: “Yes, this is an error, and you will probably have to file an amended return and pay a small penalty. But it won’t be a life-changing situation. You’ll be fine.”
Small penalty. Not life-changing. I’ll be fine. These thoughtfully chosen words added context to a scary situation in a way that calmed me down. They sounded infinitely better than scary-sounding words like, “We will need to investigate this error and determine its seriousness.” Above all, they motivated me to fix my mistake and pay my proper taxes without argument.
This is the essence of reframing: using language to increase positive emotions and decrease negative ones. Marriage and family therapists, who originally coined the term decades ago, use reframing as an integral part of therapy. They use it to make it easier for people to talk about scary feelings, open up to each other, and grow and change. Think, for example, of a couple who are always arguing. A good therapist would frame this as a sign that they both care about what they are discussing and would work with that.
With customers, reframing can be used to lessen the impact of an unpleasant situation, make the customer feel better, or make your solutions more palatable. Here are some examples:
Not-so-good response: You will have to pay a penalty because your payment was late.
Better response: There is a small fee for payments that arrive after the fifteenth of the month.
Not-so-good response: You shouldn’t have parked here. It is a no-parking zone.
Better response: People often try to park here without reading the signs. Let me show you the closest place where you can park legally.
Not-so-good response: We can’t get you on a connecting flight until tomorrow.
Better response: We can put you on an overnight connection that will get you home twelve hours from now.
In each of these cases, you aren’t simply sugarcoating the news (that is, minimizing it in a way that the customer can easily see through). Rather, you are framing these situations around the customer’s interests in a way that makes them easier to accept. The key difference is that reframing is primarily intended to benefit the customer rather than to talk the customer into something.
So how do you reframe things yourself, particularly in the middle of a developing customer situation? There are three key principles behind the mechanics of reframing.
Normalizing
This term, originally used in mathematics, means to compare things to a norm. With customers, it means describing a situation that is unusual for them as being more common or normal than they think. Here are some examples:
Situation: A customer’s luggage is lost.
Normalized situation: “Bags often get delayed, and they almost always show up within twenty-four hours.”
Situation: A customer is clueless about how to use a computer.
Normalized situation: “Lots of people find it intimidating to use a computer for the first time. We have some good resources for people who are just getting started.”
Situation: A customer is behaving disruptively.
Normalized situation: “People often get upset when things like this happen. I would like to help you. Can we talk about this?”
Relative Value
This form of reframing revolves around using words to make a situation sound better. Here a delay becomes a short wait, a week becomes seven days, and a fine becomes a small fee. This works best when the comparison is credible (you don’t, for example, want to call a two-month wait “short”) and the intention is to make the customer feel better.
Context Framing
Here, you are putting things in a broader context to make them sound better, such as how you normally handle this situation, what a customer can expect, or what you can do. For instance:
Situation: Your hospital is running at capacity, and there is a wait for beds.
Context framing: “Our normal time frame for admitting your mother during peak periods like this should be about four to six hours. Here is what we can do to make her comfortable in the meantime.”
Situation: A customer is upset because she just flunked her driving examination.
Context framing: “When people need to take the exam over, we can reschedule it as soon as a week later.”
Situation: Someone who just checked in at your hotel is afraid to use the elevator, you are booked solid, and the guest’s room is on the tenth floor.
Context framing: “We often send a bellman to ride with people who don’t like being alone on elevators. Would you like to have me call for someone?”
In each of these cases, things work best when you prepare in advance for how you describe your most common situations. Either way, when you try to see things through the eyes of customers, you can often find a hook that gives them hope, saves face, or helps them feel understood. If you do it well, you can often make a real change in a customer’s perceptions with the words you choose.
How to See People Differently? Take a Seat
You can also reframe your own perceptions of customers themselves, using a simple technique from psychotherapy. The “empty chair” technique, a fundamental part of Gestalt therapy, is used to help people develop insight and perspective about other people. Here is how it works:
First, sit across from an empty chair. Imagine that a person you don’t like, such as one of your most frustrating customers, is sitting in this chair.
Tell the person in the empty chair exactly what you are thinking about him or her. Don’t hold anything back.
Now get up, sit in the empty chair, and respond as you imagine the other person would respond.
Amazing things can happen when you physically and verbally take on other people’s perspectives. You may see their pains, their frustrations, their sides of the story. More important, you learn to describe those people in their voice, using their language. For example, someone you call a “control freak” becomes detail-oriented, a “drama queen” is someone who is often anxious and in need of reassurance, and a “hostile jerk” suddenly turns into someone who may feel voiceless, powerless, or concerned about how his children are being treated.
After you do this exercise (which you can easily do in your head), start using the other person’s language to describe her and think about her in the future. Then see what it does for your own ability to engage people in productive dialogue and problem solving.
When Reframing Is a Bad Idea
As powerful as it is, reframing must be used with caution. Why? Because there is often a thin line between making a difficult customer feel better and BS-ing that person. As a general rule, this approach can be very useful as long as you don’t push it too far.
Perhaps the most important tool in reframing properly is your gut. Listen to what you say through the ears of your customers—especially difficult ones—and then think through how they would react. Here are three situations you need to avoid when reframing:
Sounding Insincere
A little reframing is almost always socially acceptable, but too much of it can make you look foolish. For instance, trying to make an outrageously long delay seem normal, or a particularly bad service experience seem common, can make you seem out of touch instead of helpful.
Minimizing the Customer’s Concerns
As a rule, reframing is meant to minimize your agenda, not the customer’s. So although it is OK to, say, refer to stupid customer behavior as “a common situation,” or your penalties as “a small surcharge,” you should never refer to a customer’s stated concerns as “a minor inconvenience” or a “slight problem.” (In fact, as we discussed in Chapter 2, it is usually best to lean into customers’ agendas and mirror their emotions.)
Being Untruthful
When reframing crosses the line from optimism to dishonesty, you risk losing the trust of your customer—or losing your customer, period.
Ultimately, reframing is a lot like acting: It works best when people are not explicitly aware you are doing it. Using gentle, nonthreatening, benefit-oriented speech will normally help you as long as you keep it within appropriate boundaries. In time, the habit of using these patterns of speaking can become an easy and natural part of who you are.
Our Client Caused an Accident? Get in Line
Once I was involved in a serious auto accident. I was stopped at a red light, in my brand new car, when a large truck plowed into the back of my car without stopping. Thankfully, I was not hurt badly, but it was a frightening experience.
A couple of hours later I was sitting in an auto body repair shop with a splitting headache and my new car crumpled like an accordion, talking on my cell phone with the truck driver’s insurance company. When I finally got through to the claims department, the snippy person on the other end of the line said something like this:
“Sir, you have to understand that we have a large backlog of people with claims, and they all want their cars fixed as badly as you do. You are going to have to wait at least three days before anyone can get back to you about this.”
It is a good thing I specialize in strength-based communications, because I was pretty close to saying some not-very-strength-based things in response! But what really struck me in hindsight was how unnecessary this person’s whole attitude was. Suppose she said:
“I am so sorry to hear that you have been in an accident. How are you doing now? Obviously you want your car fixed as soon as possible, so I am going to personally make sure that someone gets back in touch with you within seventy-two hours.” (Note: Seventy-two hours is the same thing as three days.)
By simply changing a few words around, this person would probably experience a lot less hostility from customers.
A New Perspective
Used well, reframing does much more than make difficult customers feel better; it helps you see a situation differently. It focuses you on solutions and lets you view customers through the same lenses they use. And like any communications skill, it gets better with practice. Start using it as one of your regular tools and see how much it improves your customer work.
PUTTING LEARNING INTO PRACTICE
1. You are going to arrive much later than expected for a plumbing appointment. You know from experience that this customer gets upset about everything. What could you say to lessen the intensity of his reaction?
2. A season ticket holder of the professional football team you work for is being informed that his seats are being moved to a less desirable section so more luxury boxes can be built at your stadium. How would you deliver this news?
3. You are telling one of the patients at your clinic that she has been reported to a credit bureau for not paying her bill on time. How would you word this?
4. A customer is extremely loud and abrasive as she describes a haircut she felt went badly at your salon. Your manager hears this and rushes over. How would you explain the situation to the manager?