Everyone, over the course of his or her life, will experience a negative conversation with a stranger. A lot of these happen when working in a career that requires constant interaction with those outside the company. This type of situation is often challenging to deal with because you don’t know what has upset this person or how to make them feel better and alleviate their problems quickly. Here are five ways for contact centers to handle angry customers.
It may be hard to listen to another upset caller during a day that is seemingly one problem after another, so it is important to keep things in perspective. When a customer calls and explains their situation, put yourself in their shoes. This will allow you to focus 100 percent of your attention on the customer to provide a quick solution with great service instead of focusing on the number of minutes left until the end of the day. This will not only make the customer happy and dispel some of their stress, but it will also better the service you are giving the customer as they will, generally speaking, feel like you’re better taking care of them and their problem.
Don’t get caught up in your plans for after work or the weekend and tune out the contact center caller when they’re explaining what’s going on. One way to help ensure that you’re listening attentively is to reword and repeat what the customer is saying. Repeating takes care of two items: First, it ensures that you have an accurate understanding of their issue and second, it helps diffuse the situation because the customer will identify that you are actively listening to their issue.
Repeating also helps prevent the agent from frustrating the customer even more. For an angry individual, having to explain yourself over and over to an individual who is not listen will just increase the anger felt. Your goal is to leave the customer satisfied, not angry.
Let the customer know that you understand their concerns and are sincerely apologetic that the problem occurred. This will help them to calm down because they feel validated. Showing them that their concerns are valid will help you to get the situation fixed more quickly—and will help them to be more understanding towards you, because you’re not the cause of the problem.
Remember it is necessary to apologize (even though the problem is not your fault) because you are the face of the company and therefore when you apologize, you are apologizing on behalf of the company.
Humans tend to feed off each other’s emotions. It is easy to get caught up in the moment of crisis and begin speaking just as excitedly as the customer. To the same effect, do not respond in anger if they are frustrated. Regardless of your response, make sure to take a deep breath before responding and speak at a normal pace and keep your voice level mid-range. Control the situation by maintaining your tone of voice. This will help them to relax, speak more slowly, and understand you have the problem under control.
After offering the solution and taking the action necessary to fix the problem, make sure to take down the customer’s information just in case anything else goes wrong. Then in the next couple of days, follow up to make sure the solution that you offered did indeed satisfy the customer. This may not calm the contact center caller in the moment of their problem, but it will keep them coming back, because they realize you are going to get the job done quickly and correctly—and will check back to make sure.
Only tell the customer you will follow up with them after they give a verbal agreement in favor of the proposed solution to their issue. You do not want to discuss following up on the solution when the customer is already dissatisfied with the proposal.
This video from Myra Golden, a customer experience guru with over 15 years of experience, explains these concepts and more. Here’s what she has to say:
Dealing with angry contact center callers can be tough, but with these tips it will be easier to stay calm, cool and collected and provide great service while doing it. That way your customers will keep coming back and you will help uphold your company’s name, not affirm the mistake that was already made.
