There are lots of ways to win people over, and every angry customer that calls your business is a chance to do just that. You can always find solutions that will turn even the most belligerent customer into a loyal patron. The art of winning over angry and upset customers involves listening to what they have to say and then offering an amenable resolution.
This can be a highly beneficial experience for both parties involved. If you really want to convert your angry customers, you need to go beyond just superficial niceties. But, despite the headaches, angry customers are good for business—you just need to know how to deal with them.
But the thing is … Angry customers are often a part of doing business. But, did you know that angry customers can also benefit your business?
Keep reading for a closer look at 10 reasons why angry customers are good for business. Listen and Better Understand Your Customers One of the best ways angry customers can help your business is through the honest, straightforward feedback they provide.
They Help You Find Better Solutions If you really want to find a better way forward with your products, check out what your least happy customers are saying.
Lets You Know Who Cares While some angry customers may just be, well … angry, many of them are people who are genuinely passionate about your brand or products. Help You Understand Your Products Another one of the benefits of customer complaints is that they can help you better understand the ins and outs of your products. Connect With Your Customers Struggling to connect with your customers? You can't take it personally.
They don't know anything about you and you don't understand their entire situation. Patience is vital when dealing with irate customers. The customer service field is a challenging one and often misunderstood by those who have never worked in it.
Angry customers can often believe that they're the only person who has ever experienced the issue they're having. They feel that it's somehow a personal attack on them. Great customer support leads to customer retention and taking a deep breath before tackling the customer's problem goes a long way toward diffusing the situation.
If this is the first time the upset customer has reported the problem to your company, utilize your customer support software from PhaseWare fully by taking as many notes as possible. It doesn't hurt to mention in your report that the customer was angry at the time of the call. This insures that future customer service representatives have a full understanding of the mood of the call.
Take the following scenario:. Customer: "I'm frustrated because we have a limited budget and you're unwilling to offer us a discount. Customer Success Manager: "I understand, but … ".
Instead, practice reflective listening. This approach requires you understand what the other person is saying by interpreting their words and their body language. Then, respond by reflecting the thoughts and feelings you heard back to your customer. Customer Success Manager: "So, what I'm hearing is that our pricing is a barrier for your business. Your budget is tight, and I'm not offering a discount that meets your needs.
Is that correct? If you've adequately understood their sentiment, move on. If not, say, "Tell me more, so I can better understand. Your goal in this moment is to make your customer feel heard and valued. The affect heuristic is a mental shortcut. It helps you make quick, efficient decisions based on how you feel toward the person, place, or situation you're considering.
Simply put, it's the fact that we all made decisions and judgments based on our worldviews and experiences. It's our bias. In these situations, objective facts carry little weight for us. Instead, we run the decision or situation through our internal "software" and develop our own opinions based on what we already know.
If you customer keeps asking, "What's the catch? Can we move forward? Your customer could have unknowingly been trapped into a year-long contract with a vendor who did not deliver on their promises.
Because of that experience, your customer is now viewing you through that lens. Ask questions to understand the root cause of their apprehension. The questions below can help your customer relax, and yield insights into why they're unwilling to move forward:. These questions also redirect their mind from thinking you're untrustworthy to proactively considering what they need in order to move forward. The beginner's mind -- also known as the zen mind -- is the strategy of approaching every situation as if you were a beginner.
When you adopt this way of thinking, you enter every conversation with the "don't know" mind, which keeps you from prejudging a customer or their situation. The zen mind also means you let go of being an expert.
Don't prejudge your customer's frustration, forget about what they should have done, and view each conversation as a new puzzle to be solved. Try saying, "It looks like with these delays, we won't be able to meet our inbound lead generation goal. But, let's see what we can do to get the results we're looking for. Fear of a negative outcome drives many of our reactions. Commonly, fear makes us want to control things.
If a customer is being difficult, we're afraid to challenge them because we might risk the relationship. If they express displeasure with your timeline or pricing structure, we're afraid because we might not be able to fix the situation. First, let go of the idea that you need to fix anything. When sitting down with a difficult customer, your job is to listen, understand, and discern next steps -- not to immediately produce a solution. So, instead of apologizing, slapping together a mediocre fix, or validating feelings, say, "It's unfortunate X happened.
I'm aware how this is affecting your business, and I appreciate your patience as I work to resolve this matter. Chunking is the process of taking one big problem and breaking it into several smaller, more manageable portions. These small portions are easier for us to tackle, and make us more willing to begin dealing with the issue at hand.
Many people use chunking to organize their daily tasks. It's equally helpful when managing challenging problems. Does your customer always have a reason why they can't set up their account and get started using your software? At your next meeting, ask them to help you break down each of the final steps you need to take to get things moving.
Simply seeing each task chunked can make it easier for your customer to digest what's left to do. Ever throw out a price or time investment required, and watch your customer become frustrated, maybe even angry, at how high it is? Or maybe you've been on the other side. A customer tells you how much they want to pay for your new product upgrade, and it's so low it makes you mad.
The Recalibration Theory of Anger says this emotion is naturally wired into humans. In short, anger is our evolutionary way of bargaining. This one puts your team in a pinch because the customer is already convinced there is nothing your agent can do to help. In these cases, your agent barely has time to answer the call before the customer demands to speak with you instead of the agent.
The best thing you can do is empower agents to conquer customer problems without transferring interactions back to you. Train agents to be empathetic, lend an ear, and tailor these talking points for each unique experience they come across. Even better, their positive conversation might just be the lifeboat that rescues a customer from a bad day. Customers get upset with your company, product or service, and your agents are the first line of defense. We originally published this post on October 18, and we updated it for new insight on April 22, Industry Insights 10m read.
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