CHAPTER 19
When Talking Isn’t
Enough: Keeping
Yourself and Your
Customer Safe
DID YOU KNOW that increasing the price of your fast food can be dangerous? According to a March 2011 article in the Colorado Springs (CO) Gazette, after a man picked up seven crunchy beef burritos at a restaurant and discovered that each of them now cost fifty cents more, he fired at an employee with an air rifle. After police were called, he fired at officers with an assault rifle and barricaded himself in a hotel room before being charged with attempted murder.
On the one hand, serving the public is statistically one of the safest professions you can choose. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Lightning Safety Institute, you are almost twenty times more likely to be struck by lightning than to die at the hands of a customer. On the other hand, an average of about sixty people are killed by customers every year in the United States, and hundreds more are injured. Customer rage can be aimed at anyone, no matter how well he or she communicates, for reasons that range from extreme frustration to mental instability.
As a result, every person (and every employer) who serves the public needs a safety plan for recognizing serious issues, calling for help, and physically removing oneself from a dangerous situation. In this chapter, we explore how you can tell when a customer situation is getting out of hand and what to do to keep yourself safe.
Situational Awareness: Trusting Your Gut
This book focuses on the idea that saying the right things, at the right time, can calm down a difficult situation. At the same time, it is a dangerous fallacy to believe that you can talk your way out of anything. Sadly, there are people who have bad intentions or cannot be reasoned with, and situations where communications skills alone are not sufficient. As a result, an important part of your tool kit for serving the public is developing a skill we refer to as situational awareness, a term originally applied to military conflict scenarios. It involves becoming aware of your surroundings and trusting your own perceptions when a situation might get out of hand. Here are some examples of putting it into action:
Someone who comes into your retail store acts unusually agitated or evasive. You respond by making eye contact with the customer and acknowledging him, and by getting a colleague on the floor as backup.
A group of rough-looking teenagers at your video arcade are loud and disruptive. You alert security in case their behavior shifts to damaging property or harassing other customers.
One of the patients at your psychiatric hospital has just received the news that her regular counselor has left for a new position. The patient is very upset about this and is not eating or sleeping well. You make sure that you and others on your team treat this patient with caring and compassion during what is likely to be a difficult transition period.
In each of these cases, you actively look for cues that might concern you, or situations that fall far outside your norms. Some of these might include:
Avoiding eye contact or trying to stay invisible
A disregard for the rules or norms of your establishment
Talking incoherently or suspiciously
A stated or unstated sense of powerlessness on the part of the customer
Situations with major consequences for the customer
A group of people who appear to be threatening or confrontational
This is where the second and perhaps most important part of situational awareness comes in: trusting your gut when it tells you to be careful, or to take action. It may feel funny to call for help when a boisterous group of people may just be celebrating a football victory, or to get backup when a visibly upset customer may have simply had an argument with a spouse. But when things go wrong, it often happens because we underreact instead of overreact to a situation. So listen closely to that voice inside your head, and take what it tells you seriously.
The Disorderly Customer
Not all difficult customers are necessarily angry ones. People may act out or cause a disturbance for a wide range of reasons, including mental health issues, having too much to drink, or being part of a “wolf pack” intent on causing trouble. How do you try to keep these situations under control?
Lieutenant Chauncey Bennett III of the New York State University Police, who has plenty of experience dealing with disorderly people on college campuses, recommends a calm and nonthreatening approach: “Use good nonverbal body language, such as keeping your open palms visible, as you approach people and start talking with them. If they respond in a way that is irrational or threatening, use statements like, ‘Please know I am here to help you . . . can you allow me to do that?’ or ‘Is there anything I can say or do to avoid this situation getting worse so that I can help you?’ ”
When verbal techniques are not effective, Bennett trains people to recognize “fight or flight” body movements in other people, such as transitioning to terse or monosyllabic answers, making less eye contact, looking around quickly or looking “through” you, or clenching their fists or jaw muscles. These are danger signals that the situation may escalate into a physical confrontation. In cases like these, he recommends increasing the distance between you and the other person, continuing to keep your palms open and visible, and giving the person the choice between allowing you to help versus calling for assistance.
So what happens when an entire group is acting disorderly? Bennett feels that situations like that should be left to professionals with appropriate tools at their disposal. Here is how these professionals often intervene: “We frequently try to identify the group leader, take that person to the side, and explain that we need their help to assure a positive outcome to this situation. By building rapport, and letting them know that we will work to assist them if they help us calm down the situation, we can often very quickly bring some order to a disorderly incident.”
Reacting to Risk
What are your choices when a customer’s behavior doesn’t feel right to you, or starts to cross the line from difficult to unsafe?
When things go wrong on an airplane, such as the loss of an engine, pilots have a checklist they follow to manage the emergency. Ideally, you want to have a checklist for your most threatening situations as well, one that helps mitigate the possible risk for you and your customer. Here are some possible courses of action.
Make Your Presence Known
When customers act suspiciously—and particularly in cases where you feel they may be planning theft or vandalism—retailers often advise greeting these customers or at least making eye contact with them to let them know you are aware of them.
Bring in Backup
There is safety in numbers. When you have more than one person visible and on duty, it proactively lessens the possibility that a customer will act out dangerously and provides more staff to handle a situation.
Maintain Physical Space
Normally, being physically close to a customer shows interest. When someone is acting suspiciously, however, keeping a safe distance increases your reaction time and provides a margin of safety in case a customer starts to react.
Know Your Escape Routes
A good rule of thumb is to never let an upset customer get between you and your path of exit. For example, psychotherapists who work with potentially dangerous patients generally make it a point to sit between the patient and the door, and often have access to a panic button that alerts others to a critical situation.
Speak to the Other Person’s Interest
When hostage negotiators show up at the scene of a crisis situation, the first thing they usually do is check in with the hostage taker and offer to help. Do not presume that words alone are sufficient to manage a true crisis, but when you must speak, maintain a calm and helpful presence, even as you attempt to set boundaries.
Good crisis managers know how to normalize situations, by framing them with words that make things seem normal and beneficial to the customer. For instance, a neighbor of mine who works in retail security often tells shoplifters he catches that it would be more beneficial to come back to the store with him rather than having him call the police—and usually they come willingly. By taking situations where most of us get tense and bark out orders, and instead turning them into productive dialogue, we help everyone calm down and deescalate the situation.
Words That Saved a Life
If someone was on a murderous rampage, would you be able to talk him into keeping you both safe? Even though what follows is not a customer situation, it has important lessons for how service professionals should react in a crisis.
When waitress Ashley Smith came home late one night from her shift at an Atlanta-area restaurant in March 2005, she had no idea that the man accosting her in the parking lot had killed five people over the course of a day that started with a dramatic courthouse rampage and escape. While tied up and held hostage in her apartment, she tried to calm the man down by sharing stories of her own tough life. Soon he trusted her enough to untie her. As he watched the drama of the police hunt for him unfold on television, she encouraged him by saying that his situation was not hopeless and sharing stories from the Bible and the book The Purpose-Driven Life. Later she offered to cook him breakfast and further earned his trust by helping him dispose of his stolen truck.
Within several hours, the suspect finally allowed her to leave her apartment, after which she contacted the authorities and he was apprehended without incident. According to a police spokesperson, she survived because she “managed to make a rapport with him and made herself a person, not just an object.”
Don’t Go It Alone: Have a Safety Plan
When it comes to keeping yourself safe with customers, perhaps the most important advice is to get everyone in your organization on the same page. An organization is only as strong as its weakest link, and crisis-management skills are useless if only a chosen few people know them.
If you work with the public, you and your organization should have a safety plan that teaches everyone what to do in an emergency. For a customer-contact organization, elements of a good safety plan might include the following:
Crisis prevention. Teach people how to recognize situations that have the potential to erupt, together with guidelines to try to prevent them from happening in the first place.
How to react in common crisis situations. For example, many retail organizations have a policy of not fighting or resisting robbers, knowing that a single misguided employee could provoke reactions that get people hurt or killed.
Your communications plan. Make sure everyone knows whom to call, with up-to-date contact information, including the order of preference in which people should be contacted. Be sure to include outside authorities such as police, fire, or paramedics.
What to say and not say. Human nature often takes over in a crisis, but when it leads people to respond with anger or agitation, the result can be a very bad outcome. Teach people how to respond in ways that defuse the situation.
Physical safety. Document ways to evacuate or retreat to a secure location in the event that a situation becomes dangerous.
Remember, working with the public is generally very safe. Many, if not most, customer-contact professionals will go through their entire careers and never encounter a truly dangerous situation. And good communications skills, like the ones you are learning in this book, can go a long way toward keeping things safe in the first place. But with a small amount of planning and preparation, you and your team can be better equipped to help even crisis situations come to a successful resolution.