Cover your eyes and ears, customer-obsession disciples. The customer is not always right.
At least that’s the word from people on the front lines who deal with customers from hell.
What’s more, clever service professionals have figured out how to handle the you-know-whats from you-know-where-without shattering a company’s image or giving in to tyrannical demands.
No one says it’s easy.
“There are people out there that are psycho,” says Robert Dicks, vice president of agency operations for American Bankers, an insurance company in Cutler Ridge, Fla., that fields thousands of calls a month. “Thank goodness there’s only a few of them.”
Research suggests only 1 to 2 percent of customers make service employees want to pull their hair out. “Some may be the customers who have been through hell,” says Kristin Anderson, co-author of “Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service.”
Yet many of the loudest are customers who cause their own problems. Anderson, a business consultant with Performance Research Associates in Minneapolis, draws pictures based on interviews with service employees in a variety of industries. Perhaps you’ll recognize some of them:
– Egocentric Edgar loudly demands the company stop the hurricane, stop the riot and create the replacement part out of thin air so that his flight can leave.
– Bad-Mouth Betty makes it look easy to walk into a department store and “cuss like a drunken stevedore.”
– Hysterical Harold, a classic tantrum thrower, impersonates a rabid dog when told his out-of-stock part will be shipped by air for next-day delivery.
– Freeloading Freda buys a fancy gown, wears it to her company’s holiday party-“where she rolls in the punch bowl”-and takes it back for a refund.
A firm without a way to identify and defuse difficult customers likely will drive them away. “We can’t afford to serve only the people that strike us as nice,” Anderson says. “There just aren’t enough dollars in the economy.”
American Express employees are trained to empathize: They say, “I can understand why you feel that way,” or, “I would be upset if that happened to me,” said Richard Coco, manager of customer-service training at the American Express Southern Region Operations Center in Plantation, Fla.
“It’s kind of difficult for the customer to continue arguing when you’ve acknowledged them,” Coco said.
But it’s also difficult for an employee to respond coolly while being called “stupid.” The most successful staffers learn not to take insults personally. They realize, Coco said, “that we are all human and have that tendency to collect negative experiences.”
To help foster that understanding, American Express puts about 1,400 of its Plantation staffers through a course called “Creating Satisfied Customers,” by Kaset International, a Tampa customer-service training firm. Employees think about their own experiences, good and bad, as customers.
It’s a lot easier to listen to a Hysterical Harold when you have walked in his shoes.
