Paul du Toit, CSP
Usually if you can’t see them coming, you can hear them, or at worst smell the burning rubber. Difficult customers can be the bane of our lives, the kind of people who take up large chunks of our valuable time nit-picking away at seemingly trivial issues and actually costing us money in the process – the kind of folk we’d like to shepherd gently in to a barrel of over-fermented port and roll over the cliffs of Dover (we shall call this Plan A). But it’s not always the best remedy for our irritation and here’s why:
Interestingly, and logically too, there’s a fair chance that if you find someone to be difficult to deal with, others may be experiencing the same problem with that person. The experience of that person’s world is that it is a hostile and unfriendly place with a whole bunch of folk just waiting to get at them. The response is to give everyone hell most of the time. This, of course, places you in the firing line too.
Imagine the surprise when someone (you), instead of becoming defensive and reactive, bucks the trend and genuinely tries to help this person despite their crabby attitude. Well, once they’ve got over the surprise of being treated like a valuable human, you may just have won yourself a devoted fan for life! Difficult people are difficult with most other people. They annoy practically everyone. When you take the effort to exercise tolerance which they are not accustomed to receiving, you break the pattern, and could run the risk of discovering the nice person inside who’s just been waiting to come out. So often your difficult customer is a frustrated person with poor communication skills crying desperately for help.
This tactic may, however, not work with everyone. There are some customers that you may wish to refer to plan A. Here’s a suggestion for dealing with those difficult customers that may prevent you getting a criminal record for life:
If you have someone in your organisation performing a similar function to you, suggest a 50/50 swap. You take on a handful of their difficult customers in exchange for a quid-pro-quo handful of yours. By each starting on a clean slate with one another’s tough ones, you both have an opportunity to develop fresh relationships with inside information. YOu know in advance what you’re dealing with. Result? Customer retained, stress reduced, profitability sustained. Simple? Yes. Intelligent? Very.
And this leads us to an important version of the difficult customer – the complainer. The large corporates that can afford to, have been known to spend hefty sums on customer service surveys to find out what they’re doing right and wrong. The information is often quite general and varied. The cost is high, and may become outdated quickly.
Bring on the complainer: He tells you precisely how you’ve messed up, what you did wrong and what he wants you to do about it. And he does so free of charge. That complainer is giving us a clear 4 point message:
- I’m still your customer (non-complainers just leave you without saying a word)
- Solve my problem (quick!)
- Make sure it doesn’t happen again
- Maybe someone else is having a similar problem (or most likely 19 other people).
You see, 19 out of 20 people don’t bother to complain because they’re scared of the reaction they may get. They just take their business elsewhere. Perhaps this gives us a different perspective of the value of our “complainer”, or difficult customer versus the irritation factor. Fact is most companies still sweep their complaints under the carpet or hide them in a secret bottom drawer. Think-ahead companies deliberately publish their biggest complaints in their company newsletter and the procedure that was followed by the employee who addressed, followed through and solved the problem. Now this makes benchmarking sense, and not only creates a positive precedent, but contributes positively to the customer service culture in an organisation.
