Corporate E-Learning

At first glance, handling a difficult customer may seem like a thankless job. Fortunately, you can develop skills to adapt to the challenges difficult customers pose and extend these skills to handling difficult people and situations throughout your daily life. By improving the focus of your thoughts and feelings, how you manage stress, and how well you listen to and empathize with others, you will be better able to meet the challenges other people pose in both your professional and personal life. Implementing the guidelines in this module is the first step in a process towards forever changing how you interact with others.

Keeping a positive mental attitude in the face of difficulty isn’t easy. In fact, according to psychologists, our brains seem to be hardwired to focus on the negative, as studies have shown. However, here is some postivity to focus on: many studies have also demonstrated that cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” and engaging in regular exercise and meditation have dramatic effects on our sense of well being.

Life is dynamic and constantly changing. This simple fact creates emotional, mental, and physical stress. It’s not possible to avoid stress entirely. Instead, you have to learn how to manage stress and navigate through the situations that trigger stress. Often it is the stressful situations in life that bring out our best. There are two types of stressors: internal stressors and external stressors. External stressors relate to your environment. They can involve a wide variety of things from screaming alarm clocks to crowded elevators to high pressure situations such as a work deadline, caring for a sick loved one, and even positive events such as gaining recognition for achievement. Often, external stressors represent things that are beyond our control. Internal stressors are those stress triggers that are internal to each person. These can range from feeling irritable to feeling tired or unappreciated. Negative thoughts and automatic thinking are forms of internal stressors.

External stressors can often be a source of frustration. You have limited control over the things that come at you in life. When managing stress resulting from external stressors, adaptability and understanding what you can control are vital.

Our focus thus far has been on developing ourselves into positive-oriented individuals who can manage our moods and stress levels and adapt to unpleasant circumstances in a constructive way. Now we begin to focus our attention on the interactions we have with others. Conceiving of human interaction as a series of transactions where we have positive and negative rewards is a helpful approach towards understanding our relations with customers. Transactional Analysis builds on this conception.

While many of your interactions with customers will be pleasant and positive, you inevitably will have to interact with customers who are difficult in some way. Keep in mind that just as all of your emotions communicate to you so you can assess your situation, this is also the case for the difficult customer. Regardless of why they are angry or upset, their feelings are valid. Understanding the different reasons behind their behavior can help you to resolve their difficulty.

When you eliminate one of your five senses, your other senses tend to become sharper. This is an important fact to consider when working with a customer over the phone. Since you cannot see the customer nor they you, the audio aspects of the interaction become magnified, including such aspects as your tone of voice and any noises occurring in the background on either side of the line.

When you interact with a customer in person, you have both greater challenges and greater opportunities to build a rapport with that customer than you have when speaking with them over the phone. Consequently, nearly everything said about handling a customer over the phone is in play, along with additional approaches.

Customer service professionals will inevitably interact with customers who provide specific kinds of challenges. Becoming sensitive to the types of customers you will deal with, and developing strategies for specific customer situations will make those difficult customer situations less challenging. This module offers examples of the types of challenging customers that you will face, along with specific approaches that can make those interactions not only less challenging, but more rewarding as well.

In order to handle certain types of scenarios when dealing with difficult customers, it’s important to have a strategy in place before you find yourself in that situation. By engaging in role playing beforehand, you can practice what strategies you would employ and how best to implement them.

The difference between having a customer who is satisfied and a customer who will remain loyal can be determined in the steps you take to follow-up with that customer. Once you have resolved a customer’s issue, before you end the transaction, take a moment to summarize for the customer what the issue was and what the resolution was as well. Ask the customer if the situation is resolved and how you may further assist them.

Although this workshop is coming to a close, we hope that your journey continues onwards. Developing the emotional intelligence and mood management skills to handle challenging customers is a process. Expecting or demanding perfection is detrimental to that process. Instead, celebrate your progress. Please take a moment to review and update your action plan. This will be a key tool to guide your progress in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. We wish you the best of luck on the rest of your travels!