Customer Service Training Tips: Handling Difficult Customers

Customer service training offers many benefits for IT departments and businesses. One of the most important benefits of such training is helping IT pros handle difficult customers and coworkers. If you’re an IT manager, executive, or business owner, you’ll improve customer retention and cut down on employee attrition when you provide your team with tools for managing difficult people.

Customer Service Training for Difficult Customers

Difficult people come in different forms. Sometimes they’re angry, impatient, indecisive, demanding, or vague. Sometimes, it’s something else that’s challenging for you to deal with. Regardless, there are general techniques you can use to assist in dealing with difficult customers. Here are customer service training techniques your team members can use in those challenging situations:

1. Assume good intentions. Most of the time, a difficult customer is someone who is normally quite reasonable. It’s just that they feel let down by your product or service, frustrated by the interruption, or some other negative feeling. You happen to be the person who answers their call or is at the counter when they walk up. Remember, you have an opportunity to turn someone’s day around! (If you have evidence that the other person is being dishonest or intentionally bullying you, escalate the ticket (or complaint) to your supervisor. If you’re a business owner, perhaps an MSP, you have to make a decision about whether you want to continue working with a dishonest or bullying customer or terminate the relationship.)
2. Thank the customer or coworker for sharing their bad experience with you. Your natural response may be to get defensive and prepare for battle. When you thank the other person for letting you know of their unpleasant experience, you immediately start to turn the situation around.
3. Keep your calm. Of course, that’s sometimes easier said than done, but it’s a critical part of customer service training. Teach your team to pause, take a breath, and try to put themselves in the other person’s position.
4. That leads us to point #4 which is use empathy to imagine what you would want if you were in their situation. Use compassion to remind yourself that you don’t know the other person’s story. Perhaps they’re dealing with some stressful personal issues, for example, that affect their mood and temperament.
5. Use your active listening skills to ensure you fully understand the other person’s concerns. Active listening also helps the other person feel respected, which can help defuse emotionally charged situations.
6. Talk more about what you can do than what you can’t do. Try to keep the conversation as positive as possible.
7. Don’t take the other person’s comments personally. Again, that’s sometimes easier said than done. Try to remember that it’s not personal. In fact, it’s probably not about you at all!

Do you notice that these techniques have more to do with changing yourself than changing the other person? You can only hope to influence the other person. You can only change yourself and the choices you make about dealing with other people. The best way to influence others is to lead by example; be a role model for others.

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