HOW TO DEAL WITH A DIFFICULT CUSTOMER

If your business is customer-centric, then customer complaints can’t be a thing to avoid. At any point in time, something may go wrong, a mistake may be made, and customer expectations may not be met, resulting in a complaint from a customer.

However, customer complaints don’t have to be devastating for your business. Looking at the positive side, a customer complaint can provide an opportunity for you to showcase great customer service and win over a dissatisfied customer. Being able to handle customer dissatisfaction is very essential if you want to maintain customer loyalty, and customer retention, maintain a good and positive relationship with your customers and target audience and it also bolster your brand’s reputation.

Attending to unhappy customers may not be the most pleasant part of running a business, but it’s a necessary skill to have if you want to thrive in the long run and keep all your customers happy.

In this post, we will discuss some of the benefits and ways how to handle difficult customers in a way that will make both you and your customer happy.

Who is a Difficult Customer?

A difficult customer is indeed someone who deviates from the usual expectations and norms of customer interactions. These individuals often present behaviours or demands that are challenging to manage within the standard customer service framework. They can exhibit various behaviours that make interactions particularly strenuous for those providing service.

Some of the common characteristics of difficult customers include:

• Unrealistic Expectations: They may have demands or expectations beyond what the company can reasonably provide or are not aligned with standard policies or practices.
• Aggressive or Abusive Behavior: This can include verbal aggression, undue criticism, or outright hostility towards staff, which can be challenging to handle professionally.
• Persistent Complaints: They often have grievances that may seem never-ending or unsolvable, sometimes about issues that are beyond the control of the customer service team.
• Overly Emotional Reactions: Their responses can be disproportionately emotional compared to the situation, often making rational conversation difficult.
• Refusal to Listen or Cooperate: Difficult customers might not be open to listening to explanations or solutions, making it hard to resolve their issues.
• Manipulative Tactics: Some may use tactics like guilt-tripping, exaggeration, or threats (like taking their business elsewhere) to get what they want.

Ways On How To Deal With A Difficult Customer

1. Be Professional In Your Communication
When communicating with a customer, be professional, friendly and respectful. Your behaviour reflects your business, and it is always good to be mindful of your actions and repress any impulses to take the customer’s behaviour personally. To manage professional communications, keep an even tone and positive demeanour that shows you’re open to the feedback they’re giving. For example, make eye contact and/or use their name when responding.

2. Listen Attentively
If a customer complains, it means that they want you to hear what their problem is all about. Ignoring a customer complaint or failing to fully understand the problem can make the situation worse. So you should be able to listen to them attentively and make them understand you hear them perfectly well. That allows the customer to feel heard and important.

3. Be Calm And Speak Softly
Practice mindfulness when you are interacting with customers. Take note of the tension in your body and make a conscious decision to keep the present situation from stressing you out. Your interaction with the customer is more likely to be successful if you learn to recognize and modulate your emotions. For example, if a customer is angry, maintain a helpful yet serious tone.

Take a deep breath and tune into your emotions when you’re in a difficult situation. Speak in a very subtle manner because it is in your best interest to relax and make every customer interaction as smooth as possible. When you stay calm, you keep the situation from escalating.

4. Be Empathic And Apologize
Empathy is a key part of resolving any customer-facing problem or confrontation and a simple apology can go a long way. Practising empathy means stepping into the customer’s shoes and trying to see a problem from their point of view–why are they upset? And what actions would resolve the issue from their perspective?

Not only can showing empathy help you identify a solution to a problem, but it can also make the job of your customer service reps easier. Using empathy statements and attempting to relate to the customer often helps in calming everyone down.
At the same time, offering an apology can be beneficial even in situations where you don’t feel like you were wrong. An apology allows you to defuse the situation and move closer to finding a resolution.

If a dissatisfied customer senses that you genuinely understand their frustration and care about their problem, and you also take responsibility for the mistakes caused you or not, then they’ll likely be more willing to work with you toward a solution.

5. Get A Lasting Solution To Their Problem
The most important part of handling customer complaints is finding a resolution–and quickly.
No unhappy customer wants to wait around for days or weeks as you come up with a solution for their problem. Instead, prepare your customer service team with guidelines on go-to solutions for common customer complaints and limitations on what they can offer customers in a given situation. Make sure the solution provided is the right and lasting solution. It won’t be nice for them to keep coming back complaining of one thing over and over again. That will make your brand look unserious.

6. Follow Up And Create a record
Following up on a customer complaint can be a great way to engage with your audience and show that you care. The following will also help you stand out from the competition by demonstrating excellent customer service.
From the time a customer complaint is first submitted to the moment it gets resolved, record your interactions with the customer. Recording customer interactions can provide you with information that helps improve your products, services, and overall customer experience.

7. Learn With Every Experience
Customers are the heart of your business and yet sometimes not everyone can be pleased. No matter what the issue, ensure that you use the situation as a learning exercise about areas you potentially need to develop and where you can concentrate to ensure that the problem doesn’t happen again. As above, use your documentation to see if there are regular patterns that are similar and use the feedback from the customers to guarantee that any changes that need to be made are put into place to prevent comparable conflict in the future.

Benefits of Handling Difficult Customers

1. Difficult customers give your business a reality check
For every difficult client you have to handle, other unhappy customers don’t bother to voice their complaints. Therefore, an irate and challenging consumer serves as a wake-up call for your organization. You now have the incentive to fix this issue promptly so that you don’t have to deal with other customers who’ve faced the same challenges.

Difficult customer complaints can alert us to vulnerabilities in our organizational processes that we’d failed to notice previously. It’s easy for businesses to lose track of the status of specific service processes in between the hustle and bustle of daily operations.

2. How you handle difficult customers shows how strong your internal processes are
Every complaint is a test of the system, as is the management’s monitoring of the complaint’s resolution. In fact, it will also test your training programs, and how prepared the team is to handle such situations, and throw light on what needs to be done next when it comes to coaching and mentoring agents

Successful businesses have well-defined and refined systems for responding to customers. Putting these strategies to the test needs actual implementation. If you actively seek out client issues and have the competencies to calmly deal with tough customers, you can identify and change any internal policies that are responsible for an unsatisfactory client experience.

3. These interactions facilitate on-the-job training
Handling difficult customers might teach you a lot about fixing common problems. It’s great for teaching your team how to think on their feet and solve problems as they happen. Tough conversations may often provide the greatest insights on how to improve contact centre training.

A business owner and his team can discover a lot about their own attitudes and responses to issues and complaints from customers. They can better learn what to do and what to avoid, where to be patient, and where to escalate, right there on the job.

4. Handling difficult customers can improve customer loyalty
The overwhelming majority of customers who share their issues on a call will do so politely. They intend to be forthright about their experience with your company so that their problems may be resolved. Remember, customers who are complaining do have a generally favourable impression of your business as a whole. All they want is a little support and understanding, and being difficult is just their way of showing their frustration and disappointment with a brand they’ve come to prefer.

A customer’s top priority when calling in with grievances is, therefore, how you respond to their comments. An agent’s ability to positively react to consumer feedback has been shown to boost customer satisfaction. They’ll appreciate how professional you were and will remain loyal to the brand and the product, reassured that you can handle the occasional altercation.

5. Digging deeper into these customer interactions can reveal valuable insights
All businesses spend considerable resources on customer surveys that aim to discover their desires, needs, and perceptions of value. Customers who are difficult to work with can often indirectly share these details, although in a negative tone. They may help you recognize major trends in the industry or in customer satisfaction.

Instead of having to go out to look for a focus group, you can simply question, examine, and assess your most difficult customers. You will learn exactly how things stack up versus competing products. These invaluable insights can help shape both the immediate and long-term goals of the business.

Conclusion

Not knowing how to deal with difficult customers may lead to low staff morale, lost sales, and a damaged reputation for your business. The key is to learn how to make the best of a difficult customer interaction and resolve the situation in a manner that satisfies everyone. With the right tips and tactics, you’ll be prepared to navigate any situation that comes your way.

Once you have identified which customer type you’re dealing with, approach each encounter uniquely and cater your communication method to the customer type you’re working with. Think about shifting your mindset and look at every interaction as an opportunity to build rapport. Stay calm and professional no matter what situation you find yourself in. If you play your cards right, you’re likely to end up with a returning customer and in turn, avoid customer churn.

If you need more help managing difficult customers professionally, then join our Geeksvillage WhatsApp Free Training Class. Where we educate business owners on how to navigate all business-related issues.

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