Let's Talk it Over: tactics in mediating with upset customers

When a customer becomes upset, it’s almost always the consequence of a misalignment between what they expected to happen, and what actually happened. When this occurs, the customer feels betrayed in their expectation.

A rational, calm and generous person would remember Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. That is to say, when my expectation isn’t met, it’s far more likely to be accidental than intentional.

Unfortunately, our species hasn’t survived for millennia by being rational, calm and generous. Instead, our brains have evolved to be hard-coded to look out for threats, and one of our triggers is when things don’t go to plan. This is even more often the case when we don’t have a strong established relationship with the person or thing we’re dealing with, such that we'd give the benefit of the doubt.

When our expectation isn’t met and our threat response is triggered, our Lizard Brain - the irrationally suspicious and aggressive part of our brain that has existed for millions of years - takes over our conscious mind. The fight or flight chemical Adrenaline is released, and we become subconsciously defensive and/or aggressive, and far less rational in our assessments. We have our hackles up.

On a conscious level, we will usually select one of the many sensational and unlikely motives than our Lizard Brain suggests to us, and will then label the person or thing as one of three things - Lazy, Bad or Stupid. Adrenaline now acts as an ink, delivering a deep and lasting emotional imprint of that assessment into our minds like a tattoo, to be revisited every time we think about that thing or person - our brain’s way of protecting us in the future.

Unfortunately, this means that a ￡10 Amazon voucher or a month’s free membership will do very little to remedy such a situation with a customer (more on that further on). Every time that customer deals with you, or uses your product or service, they will be reminded. That means that in a competitive market, without quick, sincere corrective action you are unlikely to retain the customer in the long term unless you remove the tattoo by intervening to rewrite the psychological narrative. The sooner you do this, the easier it will be, but I’m a strong believer that all customers can be won back, so consider the following not just in your approach to de-escalation, but also to re-activating customers who churned because of a negative experience (it’s many more than you think, they just didn’t tell you at the time).

In making amends properly, there are three important steps you need to take. First, you reframe the relationship by (re)establishing trust and rapport. Then you need to rewrite the narrative they’d developed. Finally, and least importantly, you need to make it right. Steps one and two are focussed on fixing the emotional problem, where step three is focussed on fixing the material one. What follows is an exploration of each step, plus some tactics I find helpful in achieving them.

Step 1: Reframe the relationship

You won’t achieve anything with a customer who’s Lizard Brain is still in control, and their Lizard won’t let go of the reins and hand back over to their more rational self until it has made an assessment that it is safe to do so. That means establishing that you have good intentions, and can be trusted. Importantly, this assessment is deeply emotional and subconscious, so that’s the level that you need to play on. Here are a few tactics that are helpful in achieving this;

• Get personal. It’s much harder for a customer to trust a thing than a person because we understand and can relate to other people far more than to anything abstract. You need to get the customer to see you as a person, and not just a mouthpiece for the corporation. That means being authentic and sincere and using language and expression to get your personality across. It’s hard to fake this, so encouraging customer-facing teams to be their authentic selves in work is the best (and most enjoyable) approach.
• Get the whole picture. One of the quickest ways to establish rapport is to give someone the opportunity to express themselves. When people are emotionally charged, talking can be one of the best outlets for that emotion. Beginning the conversation by asking the customer to tell you what’s happened, then listening actively while they recount it, can achieve both ends. The customer will calm down by expressing themselves and warm to you in the process.
• The trinity - understanding, empathy, apology. The customer sees you as a person and has calmed down by being listened to. Now you need to build their trust in you and shatter any lingering resentment. First, playback to the customer the key breach(es) of expectation. Then show that you understand how it made them feel, by acknowledging which box (Lazy, Bad or Stupid) the customer put you in; “you must have thought we are [complete crooks / totally incompetent, etc...]., and how it made them feel. Finally, apologise. It doesn’t need to be drawn out, as long as it’s sincere. This is also hard to fake, so optimising for compassion and empathy within your customer-facing teams is critical.

Step 2: Rewrite the narrative

Once you’ve established rapport with the customer and broken down the emotional and instinctive barriers that were the consequence of their initial experience, you need to offer a new way to interpret the events that took place. Irrespective of whether they like you personally, the customer will continue to harbour resentment against your business if they aren’t given a more innocuous rationale to supplant theirs.

It does no good to try to jump in with rebuttals to the customer’s assumptions before you’ve put in the groundwork described in Step 1. Only then are they in a state of mind which is calm and rational enough to be receptive to an alternative suggestion. Here are a few things to consider when embarking on this stage in the discussion:

• Don’t rush the foreplay. Jumping into an explanation before the customer is ready emotionally will come across as combative and will undo your efforts to establish your good intentions. You’ll know when the customer has shared everything they needed to because the pace of the conversation will slow down, and it will feel calm. I like to offer the option; “I’m not sure if you’re interested, but maybe I can explain what happened on our side that gave you that impression”. It lets the customer opt-in to an explanation while validating that their assumption was legitimate.
• De-fang the story. A common reason a customer won’t want to hear your explanation is because it implies a threat to their ego - their being exposed as wrong - which they’ll want to protect against. This needn’t be a problem, because in my experience, when we let our customers down it’s usually because of a slip-up or oversight, or because something didn’t work like it was supposed to. In those instances, you can prepare the customer to hear you out by conditioning the beginning of your explanation with a humble qualifier; “I only wish we were that clever [as the customer’s assumption implies]”, or “the reality is a bit embarrassing”.
• Keep it quick, keep it real. You’re in the customer’s good graces, don’t squander them by giving them war and peace, and don’t make them feel like an idiot or an outsider by using technical, poncey or internal jargon. A quick, simple and (again) sincere explanation is the best approach.
• Make the customer the hero. Your objective is to have the customer leave feeling better, not worse, so your explanation must avoid making them feel stupid or irrational. More importantly, you can make the customer feel fantastic by communicating how valuable their feedback has been. As social creatures, we are deeply conditioned towards giving, and an act of generosity triggers the release of the social bonding hormone oxytocin, engendering feelings of self-worth and affection. If you can communicate to the customer that they’ve given you some new and valuable insight, or helped avert disaster, they’ll feel highly validated. Avoid tired platitudes like “we take your feedback seriously”, and instead put it into context, for example; “I’m worried that other customers might experience something similar, I’m going to run over to our product team straight after this call and see if we can get [whatever was wrong] changed”, or “I’m so glad you took the time to raise this to me, otherwise it may have impacted hundreds of other customers”.

Step 3: Make it right

By now, you’ve managed to build a rapport with the customer, you’ve established trust, and you’ve re-written the narrative for them. Where you go from here is highly case dependent, but it’s also less important than the earlier two steps. In some instances, you can even just ask the customer to leave it with you, and let that be the end of their involvement. Otherwise, a few options:

• If something was wrong, fix it. There’s no secret sauce to this - tell the customer that you take ownership for getting it sorted, then get it sorted.
• Focus on the positives. When talking about solutions, orient the discussion around what you can do, not what you can’t.
• Compensation is like dessert. It’s a really nice way to round off a great meal. If it’s all you’re serving your guests might eat it, but they won’t feel good about you or themselves afterwards. That’s to say, offering a goodwill gesture or some form of compensation should definitely be considered, especially in cases where there’s no easy fix to the customer’s issue, but it can never substitute for everything else I’ve discussed above.

Closing out

In my experience, these steps should be able to turn around most difficult customer scenarios. Remember that you're operating primarily on the emotional level, and work hard to demonstrate empathy and communicate sincerity throughout. I’ll close out by caution against two of the most common reasons that the steps don’t have the desired effect:

Get on the phone. As I mentioned, we’re playing on the emotional level here. All of these tactics will be infinitely harder on written channels because the palette for you and the customer to paint with emotionally is extremely limited.

Be a responsible human. Avoid the corporate “we”, or the cowardly “they”. This is all about establishing rapport mano a mano while owning up and taking sincere responsibility. 

And that's about it! I’m really keen to hear any feedback or suggestions, and especially any strategies and tactics that work for you.