Customer Service Management: Four Steps To Deal With Irate Customers.

Unlike decades ago, today customers are increasingly searching for value for money, brand promise fulfillment and all this at the back of excellent and prompt service delivery. As much as there are gross inadequacies in the protection of consumers, individual consumers tend to raise their taste for everything they purchase and in a bid to achieve that goal they have resulted in spreading choices and judging businesses on several indices.

For startups and even well established conglomerates attracting new customers and retaining the old ones are the biggest challenge hence quality customer service delivery will go along way. In a research conducted by Globalplux Consulting Services – it showed that 67.5% of individuals revisit businesses on attitudinal reasons (character). Which inferred that positive attitude in the workplace environment by customer services agents [help desk] attracts both new and old customers while negative attitude repels customers and therefore cripples business.

Customers are humans beings and as humans our needs are highly insatiable and we tend to be very difficult to please sometimes – not to mention customers who experienced difficulty using your company’s product at night, and probably try to put a call across to the call agent in the office and fail to get a solution, the help desk should be filled with certitude that they are going to have an ireful customer in the morning, at the opening of business.

Here are four major steps you can apply to scale up your customers service performance to produce quality service and remain in tune with global best practices.

Step I – Empathy: It will be inexplicable to think that you have never felt what this customers go through on daily basis considering the facts that you are a consumer of one consumable or another. So the ability of your help desk to put themselves in a position where the complainant is will help ease the pain the individual carries into the workplace. Understanding and entering into another’s feelings sends a direct message to the customer, informing him/her that your organisation is one with a touch of human face.

There is no policies in the world that stops you from sympathising with a customer. Try to make him understand that you share his pain and that everything will be rectify now that he is here while starting with a good resounding apology, it doesn’t really matter if you were the one who caused the initial challenge he is currently facing.

Step II – Invite a superior staff: Not necessarily a senior officer or your boss per-say, but the idea behind this is that which have been proven by series of research – it shows that customers tend to relax and fill very comfortable when his issues is treated by someone who is referred to as the manager in the office. Most time we (customer service person) encounter a very angry customer who will not be ready to listen to whatever you have to say, who may go as far as threatening thunder, at that point there is nothing you say that will make a difference but, with a kind word such as ‘sir we have pulled up your information from our system and I will introduce you to my manager to attend to you from here’. Now this person (manager) can be your colleague even a mid-level staff with adequate knowledge of the situation and what to do to satisfy him will do the trick. All he need to do is walk with the customer to an empty office and pull out the file and quietly fix the problem, eventually you have a happy customer walking out of your business center.

Step III – Information gap: This challenge are constantly faced by call center agents – those service persons who seat beside a phone all day attending to issues from variants of customers. Trust me they come in different colours and flavour but, your ability to effectively and efficiently handle customers worries put you on top of the chart for an award. Irate customers are predominant on phones and more difficult to please. This is because they are not seeing their solution provider face-on and in some cases such customers find it difficult to perform the tasks as the agent try to work them through it, at that point his anger escalates prompting some shouting march.

Since etiquette and social convention dictates that you are not allowed to reply in a rude manner, you are only advice to be highly polite in your response, even at that, it doesn’t guarantee he will exercise decorousness. At this point you are left with this option: ‘inform him, he has to give 2-3 minutes to pull up his information, even if his information is already up and in front of your screen’ before you return back to him there is a very high possibility that he will be calm by then to listen to your instruction while you try to fix his issues.

Step IV – Psych him up: You psych them up and hopefully it doesn’t lead to shaking them up by the security guards. But before attempting to use the fourth step ensure you have completely exhausted the first three options. This step are for recalcitrant customers who are adamant to explanation and reasons.

In this situation you are most likely to accost those types of customers who will go as far as hitting you in anger but, at that point you are allowed to call the security persons around to help calm him down while you drive home your point.

You must not be an administrative officer or the director to inculcate this actions into your daily business manners. Leadership is pivotal assets required from top to bottom individual in the workplace to help every staff attend to customers needs without involving a second party.