The Customer Service Survival Kit

by Richard S Gallagher

  Enough: Keeping

  Yourself and Your

  Customer Safe

  DID YOU KNOW that increasing the price of your fast food can be dangerous? According to a March 2011 article in the Colorado Springs (CO) Gazette, after a man picked up seven crunchy beef burritos at a restaurant and discovered that each of them now cost fifty cents more, he fired at an employee with an air rifle. After police were called, he fired at officers with an assault rifle and barricaded himself in a hotel room before being charged with attempted murder.

  On the one hand, serving the public is statistically one of the safest professions you can choose. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Lightning Safety Institute, you are almost twenty times more likely to be struck by lightning than to die at the hands of a customer. On the other hand, an average of about sixty people are killed by customers every year in the United States, and hundreds more are injured. Customer rage can be aimed at anyone, no matter how well he or she communicates, for reasons that range from extreme frustration to mental instability.

  As a result, every person (and every employer) who serves the public needs a safety plan for recognizing serious issues, calling for help, and physically removing oneself from a dangerous situation. In this chapter, we explore how you can tell when a customer situation is getting out of hand and what to do to keep yourself safe.

  Situational Awareness: Trusting Your Gut

  This book focuses on the idea that saying the right things, at the right time, can calm down a difficult situation. At the same time, it is a dangerous fallacy to believe that you can talk your way out of anything. Sadly, there are people who have bad intentions or cannot be reasoned with, and situations where communications skills alone are not sufficient. As a result, an important part of your tool kit for serving the public is developing a skill we refer to as situational awareness, a term originally applied to military conflict scenarios. It involves becoming aware of your surroundings and trusting your own perceptions when a situation might get out of hand. Here are some examples of putting it into action:

  Someone who comes into your retail store acts unusually agitated or evasive. You respond by making eye contact with the customer and acknowledging him, and by getting a colleague on the floor as backup.

  A group of rough-looking teenagers at your video arcade are loud and disruptive. You alert security in case their behavior shifts to damaging property or harassing other customers.

  One of the patients at your psychiatric hospital has just received the news that her regular counselor has left for a new position. The patient is very upset about this and is not eating or sleeping well. You make sure that you and others on your team treat this patient with caring and compassion during what is likely to be a difficult transition period.

  In each of these cases, you actively look for cues that might concern you, or situations that fall far outside your norms. Some of these might include:

  Visible agitation or distress

  Avoiding eye contact or trying to stay invisible

  A disregard for the rules or norms of your establishment

  Talking incoherently or suspiciously

  A stated or unstated sense of powerlessness on the part of the customer

  Situations with major consequences for the customer

  A group of people who appear to be threatening or confrontational

  This is where the second and perhaps most important part of situational awareness comes in: trusting your gut when it tells you to be careful, or to take action. It may feel funny to call for help when a boisterous group of people may just be celebrating a football victory, or to get backup when a visibly upset customer may have simply had an argument with a spouse. But when things go wrong, it often happens because we underreact instead of overreact to a situation. So listen closely to that voice inside your head, and take what it tells you seriously.

  The Disorderly Customer

  Not all difficult customers are necessarily angry ones. People may act out or cause a disturbance for a wide range of reasons, including mental health issues, having too much to drink, or being part of a “wolf pack” intent on causing trouble. How do you try to keep these situations under control?

  Lieutenant Chauncey Bennett III of the New York State University Police, who has plenty of experience dealing with disorderly people on college campuses, recommends a calm and nonthreatening approach: “Use good nonverbal body language, such as keeping your open palms visible, as you approach people and start talking with them. If they respond in a way that is irrational or threatening, use statements like, ‘Please know I am here to help you . . . can you allow me to do that?’ or ‘Is there anything I can say or do to avoid this situation getting worse so that I can help you?’ ”

  When verbal techniques are not effective, Bennett trains people to recognize “fight or flight” body movements in other people, such as transitioning to terse or monosyllabic answers, making less eye contact, looking around quickly or looking “through” you, or clenching their fists or jaw muscles. These are danger signals that the situation may escalate into a physical confrontation. In cases like these, he recommends increasing the distance between you and the other person, continuing to keep your palms open and visible, and giving the person the choice between allowing you to help versus calling for assistance.

  So what happens when an entire group is acting disorderly? Bennett feels that situations like that should be left to professionals with appropriate tools at their disposal. Here is how these professionals often intervene: “We frequently try to identify the group leader, take that person to the side, and explain that we need their help to assure a positive outcome to this situation. By building rapport, and letting them know that we will work to assist them if they help us calm down the situation, we can often very quickly bring some order to a disorderly incident.”

  Reacting to Risk

  What are your choices when a customer’s behavior doesn’t feel right to you, or starts to cross the line from difficult to unsafe?

  When things go wrong on an airplane, such as the loss of an engine, pilots have a checklist they follow to manage the emergency. Ideally, you want to have a checklist for your most threatening situations as well, one that helps mitigate the possible risk for you and your customer. Here are some possible courses of action.

  Make Your Presence Known

  When customers act suspiciously—and particularly in cases where you feel they may be planning theft or vandalism—retailers often advise greeting these customers or at least making eye contact with them to let them know you are aware of them.

  Bring in Backup

  There is safety in numbers. When you have more than one person visible and on duty, it proactively lessens the possibility that a customer will act out dangerously and provides more staff to handle a situation.

  Maintain Physical Space

  Normally, being physically close to a customer shows interest. When someone is acting suspiciously, however, keeping a safe distance increases your reaction time and provides a margin of safety in case a customer starts to react.

  Know Your Escape Routes

  A good rule of thumb is to never let an upset customer get between you and your path of exit. For example, psychotherapists who work with potentially dangerous patients generally make it a point to sit between the patient and the door, and often have access to a panic button that alerts others to a critical situation.

  Speak to the Other Person’s Interest

  When hostage negotiators show up at the scene of a crisis situation, the first thing they usually do is check in with the hostage taker and offer to help. Do not presume that words alone are sufficient to manage a true crisis, but when you must speak, maintain a calm and helpful presence, even as you attempt to set boundaries.

  Good crisis managers know how to normalize situations, by framing them with words that make things seem normal and beneficial to the customer. For instance, a neighbor of mine who wor
ks in retail security often tells shoplifters he catches that it would be more beneficial to come back to the store with him rather than having him call the police—and usually they come willingly. By taking situations where most of us get tense and bark out orders, and instead turning them into productive dialogue, we help everyone calm down and deescalate the situation.

  Words That Saved a Life

  If someone was on a murderous rampage, would you be able to talk him into keeping you both safe? Even though what follows is not a customer situation, it has important lessons for how service professionals should react in a crisis.

  When waitress Ashley Smith came home late one night from her shift at an Atlanta-area restaurant in March 2005, she had no idea that the man accosting her in the parking lot had killed five people over the course of a day that started with a dramatic courthouse rampage and escape. While tied up and held hostage in her apartment, she tried to calm the man down by sharing stories of her own tough life. Soon he trusted her enough to untie her. As he watched the drama of the police hunt for him unfold on television, she encouraged him by saying that his situation was not hopeless and sharing stories from the Bible and the book The Purpose-Driven Life. Later she offered to cook him breakfast and further earned his trust by helping him dispose of his stolen truck.

  Within several hours, the suspect finally allowed her to leave her apartment, after which she contacted the authorities and he was apprehended without incident. According to a police spokesperson, she survived because she “managed to make a rapport with him and made herself a person, not just an object.”

  Don’t Go It Alone: Have a Safety Plan

  When it comes to keeping yourself safe with customers, perhaps the most important advice is to get everyone in your organization on the same page. An organization is only as strong as its weakest link, and crisis-management skills are useless if only a chosen few people know them.

  If you work with the public, you and your organization should have a safety plan that teaches everyone what to do in an emergency. For a customer-contact organization, elements of a good safety plan might include the following:

  Crisis prevention. Teach people how to recognize situations that have the potential to erupt, together with guidelines to try to prevent them from happening in the first place.

  How to react in common crisis situations. For example, many retail organizations have a policy of not fighting or resisting robbers, knowing that a single misguided employee could provoke reactions that get people hurt or killed.

  Your communications plan. Make sure everyone knows whom to call, with up-to-date contact information, including the order of preference in which people should be contacted. Be sure to include outside authorities such as police, fire, or paramedics.

  What to say and not say. Human nature often takes over in a crisis, but when it leads people to respond with anger or agitation, the result can be a very bad outcome. Teach people how to respond in ways that defuse the situation.

  Physical safety. Document ways to evacuate or retreat to a secure location in the event that a situation becomes dangerous.

  Remember, working with the public is generally very safe. Many, if not most, customer-contact professionals will go through their entire careers and never encounter a truly dangerous situation. And good communications skills, like the ones you are learning in this book, can go a long way toward keeping things safe in the first place. But with a small amount of planning and preparation, you and your team can be better equipped to help even crisis situations come to a successful resolution.

  CHAPTER 20

  From Customer Crisis

  to Excellent Service:

  Lessons for the Whole

  Organization

  MANY PEOPLE look at the skills in this book as mainly being important for one thing: handling difficult customer situations. I would like you to rethink this idea.

  My experience is that the benefits of critical customer skills go far beyond customer interactions. Deployed properly, as part of an integrated approach to training, coaching, and employee orientation, these tools can fundamentally change the morale, turnover, service quality, and success of your entire workplace. As we close, let’s look at how you can use crisis communications skills as a foundation for success.

  Creating a Service Culture

  Every workplace on the face of the earth will tell you that it should deliver good customer service. In my view—and more important, my experience—teaching everyone critical customer skills is the key to making this happen.

  Many organizations mistakenly believe that good service is a matter of attitude. Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to succeed by asking grown men and women to change their attitudes. In my experience as a manager and consultant, real change comes from creating a culture of continuous growth and learning—in other words, by teaching people valuable life skills and making them part of something bigger than themselves.

  People fundamentally do not like being told how to feel or how to behave. At the same time, most of us love learning new skills that improve our lives. And when you give everyone the same kinds of skills that other crisis professionals use, you give them the gift of confidence and leadership. This, in turn, always leads to dramatically better service.

  Watch Me Handle This

  Once I was shadowing agents at a large call-center operation as part of a consulting visit. As soon as I sat down with one woman a customer came on the line, and it was clear that he wasn’t happy—because I could hear him shouting right through the earpiece of her headset. Then this agent put him on hold, turned to me with a smile, and said quietly, “Watch me handle this.”

  Then she went back to the call and nailed it with the perfection of Michael Jordan sinking a three-pointer. She acknowledged his frustrations, validated his concerns, and laid out his options in a way that made her sound like his best friend and advocate.

  In my own career of managing customer support operations, sometimes when an upset customer would demand to “speak to the manager”—that would be me—some of my agents would sit in my office and listen to us talk on the speakerphone. Of course, my goal was to send the customer away happy. But I also had another equally important objective: showing my team how to go into these situations with confidence.

  Managing Internal Conflict

  Do you work with people who gossip? Are backstabbers? Create drama on a regular basis? Or perhaps have retired on the job and forgot to tell you about it?

  Guess what? All of these people are difficult customers too—difficult internal customers. And the way you address these energy-sapping, productivity-killing behaviors is by using exactly the same kinds of communications skills that you use with difficult external customers.

  Scratch the surface of most workplaces and you will usually find these behaviors being handled through anger, frustration, or punishment. Unfortunately, these approaches rarely work well. But when people learn to speak to the interests and positions of others, using strength-based communication, everything changes.

  When I am called in as a therapist to do workplace interventions with teams in conflict, the vast majority of my work involves using exactly the same kinds of communications skills taught in this book for handling challenging customer situations. By learning and practicing these skills, employees and managers alike can become their own “therapists” and help create a more harmonious and productive workplace.

  How to Talk to a Backstabber

  In live workshops, I often ask attendees how they would talk to people who are “stabbing them in the back”—in other words, saying negative things about them to others. Their answers are almost always the same: Confront them, call them on their behavior, and demand they stop it.

  Next, I ask for a show of hands of how many of them have never, ever expressed an opinion about someone at work. No one ever raises a hand, of course. Then I point out that although I intentionally used the emotionally charged phrase “stabbing them in the back” t
o describe this behavior, in reality it is something nearly everyone normally does.

  Then we look at what they might say in order to productively open dialogue, and often end up with something like this: “You probably don’t feel you get a fair shake here. You might think some people get breaks that you don’t. You probably even talk about people here to others, just like I do. I’d like to see if there are ways we could work together in the future so I could support you. What do you think?”

  Personal Growth

  I speak forty to fifty times a year all over North America. Do you know what the most common comment is that I hear from these audiences after I speak?

  “I can’t wait to try these techniques at home!”

  There is actually some good science behind this statement. Many of the techniques described in this book spring from theories of marriage and family therapy, designed around working with couples and families in conflict. The same skills that calm down customers can also open dialogue with your partner, your parents, your teenagers, or your mother-in-law.

  So if you teach your team members how to defuse customer conflict, you are giving them skills that impact the rest of their lives in a positive way. Their daily work with customers reinforces these skills and helps them foster good family and workplace relationships, which in turn leads to happier employees. It is a win-win situation that costs the organization little or nothing.

  This point was driven home to me recently after I had taught a workshop in acknowledgment skills. One workshop participant came up to me with a broad smile of recognition on her face. She exclaimed, “Now I finally understand my husband! He is an interrogator with a national law enforcement agency, and he is so good with people. No one can ever get in an argument with him!” (Hopefully, she can now match him skill for skill at the dinner table.) Crisis skills are life enhancing, and with the right environment at work, they can become contagious.