Customer Service, CX Master

A successfully run business and unhappy clients are inherently indivisible. This may shock you but if there are several complaints piled up at your customer services’ desks, then this may just be a fortunate stroke of serendipity for you! Everything has its pros and cons and angry customers can help your business if you are willing to see the other side of the picture.

No matter how dutiful and dedicated you are, negative responses will always exceed the positive feedback you and your teams receive. Customers are more inclined towards highlighting your minor incompetencies than admiring and praising your stellar services. Inbox inundated with emails, voice mail flooded with customer complaints, and even face to face disapproval and objection on your services are a few aspects that come as a package deal with your business. It may seem chaotic and disadvantageous to the optimum functionality of your business, but angry customers can actually help you a lot.

Don’t Want Angry Customers?

Avoiding unhappy customers is not really a possibility, but reducing their number is quite likely if you act rationally and strategically.

If you are available for your customers and can give them your undivided attention and uninterrupted time, then it will do wonders for your customer service and business’s marketing. This will be worth the dollars that they are expending on your business.

Reach out to your customers regularly and develop an amicable relationship with, but don’t compromise in professionalism. Try to resolve their issues at your earliest convenience and assure them that you will devote yourself to their service.

Utilize tools like social media platforms to connect with customers outside the boundaries of business and take an interest in their likes and dislikes. This will minimize the disparity between the customer’s expectations and what you are delivering and offering.

Make sure you maintain a balance in this critical relationship. Just to please the customers you cannot make unachievable promises that will disappoint the customers greatly when not fulfilled. It is always smarter to over-deliver than to over-promise.

How Should You Handle and Respond to Customer Complaints?

Let’s explore how you can effectively deal with angry customers and please them:

Keep Calm:

If the customer starts yelling or transcends the boundaries of professionalism and respect, make sure you remain calm and don’t respond in a similar attitude. Your aim should be to eliminate the element of hostility and animosity amongst each other.

Emphasize on Why:

As a worker, your initial instinct would be to get defensive and delve into a realm of denial. You probably wouldn’t digest the fact that there is an issue or inadequacy on your part. But this is the defining moment of the whole process that can either salvage your relationship with the customer of completely dissolve it.

Make sure you identify the root cause and investigate why there was an issue in the first place. This overarching question will solve half of your problem and you can begin taking indispensable actions.

Sympathize and Listen Keenly:

The basic skill of active listening can save you a lot of trouble in this challenging time. The reflective listening approach can also be very beneficial if exercised in this regard. This practice urges you to closely understand the context of what the customer is conveying and interpret his words to derive a meaning out of them. Then you must respond by reflecting on what you have garnered and felt through all that customers mentioned and complained about.

Don’t Take it to Heart:

Make a mental note that anger is natural and kind of inevitable in this case. Not all customers are going to be completely satisfied with your product and services. Some might find them obnoxious to have genuine complaints. The customers don’t bear any malice against you, they are just displeased, so, don’t take it personally.

Acknowledge the Issue and Take Required Actions:

Take sufficient time to probe the issue and then think of ways how can you rectify the mistake or issue faced by the customer. Correct the situation yourself, if you believe it falls under your expertise, otherwise consult someone proficient in this discipline. Make sure you consult the customer and consider their opinion.

Apologize When Needed:

Whether you believe that the complaint is legitimate or a bogus claim, you have to treat it with utmost concern and respect. You must apologize decently and show that you genuinely care about them.

Are Unhappy Customers Really Beneficial For Your Business?

If a customer took time out to express their disappointment or anger towards your products or services, then it means that you matter to them and they want to continue to engage in business with you. So, this is good news for you!

If you ignore the complaint or provide weak and subpar customer service, then you are opening the door for customers and are compelling them to leave. So, this is a major NO for you.

Make sure that the customer feels heard and acknowledged. If you provide attention and grant special treatment to customers, they will feel valued and respected. This will keep them riveted to your business and they will remain your loyal customers.

Encourage customers to share their feedback and mention if they felt like the issue was dealt with concern and competence. Keep a documented record of the feedback and ensure that the customers are satisfied after their issue has been resolved.

The best business isn’t the one with the least number of unhappy clients; it is the business with the greatest number of clients who were angry at first but their complaints were resolved efficiently and they were satisfied.

Conclusion:

All of this may seem like a lot of tedious work and effort but once you get a hold of this strategy you will turn all the frowns into smiling faces in no time. They are your customers and a complaint means that they had expectations from you.

Turn this trust to your benefit and prove to the customers that they matter to you. If you play your cards right and incorporate the above-discussed tips and tools to build a strong customer relationship, you will grow into a family from a business!

Lets assume that you have the perfect product. One that everyone needs. You’ve priced it right and everyone in the world can afford it. It works without errors and flaws and doesn’t break and is extremely simple to use (while a smartphone is simple to use – its not necessarily cheap so finding that magic “widget” is probably a dream that will never come true!).

How much would you like to bet that you would still have customers complaining about it? Hard is it might be to believe the phrase –

“you can please most of the people some of the time and some of the people most of the time, but you can NEVER please all of the people all of the time!”

– is unfortunately way too accurate.

What you will see and notice however is that the 80/20 rule (remember that? I mentioned it earlier here) applies in this like it does in most things. If you haven’t read my post, allow me to paraphrase – the 80/20 rule (also known as the Pareto Principle) states that 80% of “x” comes from 20% of “y”. You could state it like 80% of your customer interactions come from 20% of your issues. Or perhaps another way – 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.

Now obviously the percentages might not always line up to exactly 80/20 but you will find that this is accurate and close more often than not.

So how does this apply to you and the miracle product? Well it might not , to be honest – not if you have one single price point across the board. However if you’ve priced it based on income, you might potentially be charging more for this product in some regions than in others. The 80/20 rule would tell you to concentrate on the 20 sectors that are actually generating the most revenue for you – if you do the math, you’ll see that the other sectors don’t amount to the same value and your efforts are best spent where they are most fruitful.

So if we take our example of the miracle product you might find that the following applies –

Region 1 (Affluent and Developed Economies) – product priced at $100/unit
Region 2 (Developing and Growing Economies) – product priced at $50/unit
Region 3 (Growing and Restructuring Economies) – product priced at $10/unit

Region 1 will probably account for the highest percentage of your sales and also the lowest cost with regards to support as they have the infrastructure in place to utilize the product fully and also to understand what it can and cannot do.

Region 2 & 3 will together account for a significant portion of your revenue but will also have the largest volume of support issues as they do not have the understanding of the products limitations and while this is a “miracle” product unfortunately it cannot in itself do miracles!

The unfortunate fact of human nature is that generally the lower paying clients have a much higher level of demand to those at a higher price point.

From a real world perspective I previously had a job at a large Internet company that was experiencing severe growing pains (to put it mildly!) and as the Manager I was frequently on the short end of the stick. More often than not, during the course of an outage I would be speaking to businesses with 5-10 impacted users on a conference call and have to explain what we were doing to everyone in the company … by contrast I would have an hourly update call with the Senior Network Analyst at a business that was on a similar service but that had thousands of customers impacted!

I’m sure you’ve all heard the story about the contractor charging $100/day for a job and not getting any business but that same contractor choosing to charge $200/day getting inundated with work. The perception in the market place is that the person charging more is also WORTH MORE. Be careful with this though as if you cannot “back up” your requested salary with a corresponding skill-set, you are not going to get far at all!

Now please do not take this post to imply in any way that the customer isn’t right. That Region 3 customer buying your $10/unit product could eventually turn into your monster customer that IS your business. If you are able to “upsell” your customers from one product to another, based on value and worth it is easily done.

It is always worth the effort to nurture your customers as the hardest part of growing any business is getting new customers in the door. However you do need to do some careful analysis and tracking to ensure that the revenue you are earning from your customers is not actually COSTING you more in the long run – and remember – if you do not have that miracle product, you can only imagine that your complaints are going to be higher!

CX Master

Tag Archives: Customer Service

How Angry Customers Can Help Your Business