Have you ever had to deal with a difficult customer? Every business owner has a story they tell to friends and family about a time they had to deal with that one person. When we encounter something unpleasant, it’s natural to want to avoid that interaction from happening again. However, while uncomfortable, difficult customers represent an opportunity for you and your business.
Let’s dive into how to handle unhappy customers and turn those encounters into fuel to improve your business.
Difficult Customer Interaction Checklist
Having a checklist for interacting with difficult customers is a good way to manage uncomfortable situations. With a procedure in place, you have a guide and tool set that can be taught and replicated for you and your employees.
Be Professional
Maintaining professionalism serves several purposes:
- It demonstrates that you know what you’re doing and have a standard among staff.
- As a tool, professionalism removes emotions from your response.
- Protects you and your employees by providing a default response that implies customers are speaking with a business, not an individual, as the target.
Use active listening
Active listening will benefit you in several ways. It will demonstrate that the customer has been heard and that their concerns are valid. Often, customers feel that their issues are disregarded, but active listening conveys to them that you are listening and are looking to help them. Part of this involves asking questions and relaying information back to the customer to ensure they are on the same page. Once you have heard what the customer is telling you, you can then figure out a solution.
Solutions focused
If you encounter any legitimate issues with your product or service, you should be able to provide solutions or alternatives to address them. It isn’t enough to offer an apology in some instances; just having an apology will further anger a disgruntled customer.
Back yourself
Ultimately, you need to back yourself and your business. Be confident in the goods and services you provide, and be firm when providing solutions.
Difficult Customer Interaction Example
To illustrate how to use our checklist, let’s look at an example:
Cafe Scenario:
Customer: This coffee is cold again! I’ve told your staff multiple times. Is this going to keep happening?
Owner (professional/active listening/clear communication): I’m sorry to hear that. Let’s fix this. Just to be clear, you’ve received cold coffee multiple times? Was it always from the same staff member or at a specific time of day?
Customer: Always in the morning, I’m not sure who the staff is, but I come by every Tuesday and Wednesday.
Owner (Solutions-focused): Thanks for letting me know. I’ll speak with the staff rostered on. Let me get you a coffee on the house.
Customer: Thank you.
Owner (Back yourself): No problem. We can only get better with feedback. Have a great day!
This basic scenario utilises our checklist, showing replies and interactions that use a combination of strategies. While the incident is relatively trivial and the solution is low-cost, what the checklist provides is a standard that would treat any other kind of incident in the same manner.
Professional > Active Listening > Communicate Cleary > Solutions Focused > Back Yourself
Improve your business with difficult customers
Conflict can sometimes offer an opportunity to improve your business, and using an incident with a difficult customer is one way to do this. In our scenario, a customer has had an issue multiple times (cold coffee), which has been remedied with a short-term solution (free coffee). What can the business owner do to prevent this issue from occurring again? The business owner can speak with the barista rostered on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, as well as check if the coffee machine is operating correctly. Either way, the issue could be due to staff training, machine malfunction, or, in some cases, user error (customer).
Whatever it is, you can find a way to improve your business, whether it’s training your staff properly, maintaining your machine assets, or having a conversation with your customers. Maybe in this instance, the customer wants their order extra hot but hasn’t communicated that effectively with the barista.
Ultimately, your business can benefit from complaints and bad reviews in several ways, usually by gaining insight on:
- Areas of improvement for your business operations.
- Customer feedback, customer training exercises and customer personalities that frequent your business.
- Product testing to fine-tune your goods and services.
