#40) How to Deal With Angry Customers | Maintaining Your Zen

Is the customer always right? Email us what you think at projects@letseatgrandma.com We’d also love to hear your customer horror stories and how you dealt with them.

Today, we’re going to talk about dealing with angry customers! We’re going to have stories, tips, strategies in dealing with them.

Dealing with Angry Customers: The Three Things I’ve learned.

1.) Start developing a sense of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence: Notice that gut wrenching feeling in your stomach, take a breath, and just keep going.

Understand why this person is acting the way that they do. 9/10 people are acting from an instinct of FEAR. Not hate for you. These people don’t hate you...they are just afraid that their situation isn’t going to work out.

2.) Reframe the conversation into a problem-solving session.

Remember: it is so important to stay objective in these situations. You need to remove that emotional feeling as much as possible and get past that barrier no matter what. The easiest way to do this is to think of it like a puzzle you are trying to solve. This will make you more curious about the root of the problem--which would better help you solve it, and not let your emotions cloud your judgement. And the quicker you can get them to cooperate and go into the same problem solving mode -- the better!

What this also will do is give you a sense of confidence that you wouldn’t otherwise have if you were taking it personally. This confidence is incredibly important when you’re dealing with customers because if you are just going to take the weak position, people aren’t going to trust you to solve their problem.

3.) L.A.S.T.

I am a personal fan of the last technique. I’ve even heard of the BLAST technique, which I’ll tell you about after the LAST technique:

• Listen
• Apologize
• Solve
• Thank

B. is for Believe...

Tips and techniques to add on top of that: use their name and smile when on the phone with this person.

Resources and Call to Action

• Molly Edmonds in her article How Anger Works explains the anger reaction.
• Email us at projects@letseatgrandma about a time when you dealt with an angry client. Do you believe in the old adage, "The customer is always right?"

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