Customers from hell worth a Laugh

By Selwyn Parker

Wearing street socks with old shoes, shorts and a none-too-clean Hawaiian shirt, the fifty-ish gentleman steps out of the lift at the Sky City casino to take on the slot machines. He has all the appearance of a customer from hell.

Two staff - a man and a woman - swoop on him as he moves on to the main gaming floor.

"Good afternoon, sir. How are you?" "Fine, thanks." "We have a dress code here, sir." "Yes." "I'm afraid your present clothing doesn't meet it." "What's wrong with it?" he asks belligerently.

"Perhaps you'd like to come over here, sir, and we can talk about it." Grumbling but compliant, he is led off, never to return, at least not without pants and a clean top. Oblivious to this drama so neatly diverted into a side room, the casino's patrons carry on losing money.

Michele Comeau, a specialist in customer retention who runs Performance Unlimited in Albany, would approve. In fact, this is pretty much what she has advised casino staff in Las Vegas and banks, among other sectors in New Zealand, to do when an example of this feared species comes through the door. On March 16 she will present a seminar on this subject for the Auckland Chamber of Commerce (details on 09 520 7440).

Don't confront the customer from hell, Comeau says. Channel the aggression. The goal is to try to win them over, although you might feel like smashing them in the teeth.

The trouble with difficult customers is that, right or wrong, they become your worst advertisement. "What do angry customers do? They tell others," Comeau warns.

A lot of evidence in the customer literature supports this view. In his book How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life, Michael le Boeuf says that only 4 per cent of dissatisfied customers tell businesses about their bad experiences. The other 96 per cent just never come back. But they make sure they tell their friends.

So you have to learn to Laugh, to use Comeau's acronym. No, you don't burst out laughing and humiliate the customer.

Laugh is basically a policy of appeasement. You listen, acknowledge, understand, give solutions, and hit home. Hence Laugh, which Comeau believes embodies the essential psychology of dealing with people who are probably congenitally unreasonable.

The goal is to divert the issue before it harms your own interests.

As Comeau, American-born daughter of a New Zealand mother, tells it, there's quite a bit of skill in having a Laugh with the customer.

"You've got to ground yourself first," she says. "It's part of the toolkit." In practice, that means the unfortunate recipient of the hellish customer's fury lowers his or her voice and says something like: "Tell me what happened."

After they've had an opportunity to describe the circumstances that fired their anger, customers from hell have generally quietened down.

Next, acknowledge what you've been told. You don't have to agree with it, just confirm you have listened to what was probably a tirade.

It's apparently fatal to say something like "I understand how you feel" until you've heard the full story. This only drives the customer to higher planes of indignation because they think you're only trying to pacify them.

Only when you've taken the full blast do you interject with an expression of understanding. For example, the harmless: "I can see why you're upset." This identifies you with the customer's interest and tends to further pacify them.

Now you can get cunning. When giving solutions to the customer, give two. This is because difficult customers are often thrown when having to make a choice.

Also, it means they can't shout: "No way!", which they might if you only offered them one solution.

It's also important to come up with the solution forthwith. In dealing with tricky customers, speed is of the essence. "Take care of it quickly," urges Comeau.

If the customer has calmed down enough to consider one of the two options, you've just about won.

And finally, hit home with a follow-up. A few days later, advises Comeau, send a card, chocolates or whatever might be appropriate to the business. Some people might have a problem with this, especially if the customer has been offensive.

After all, most of your customers are probably pleasant and uncomplaining, but they don't get cards or chocolates.

Comeau, however, regards this as a defensive tactic designed to stop the customer bad-mouthing your business.

Laugh isn't foolproof, as she readily acknowledges. "You're not going to win them all," she says. But you should defuse all but the most hellish customers.

And if they're that bad, you probably didn't want them anyway.

Of course, plenty of customers storm into a bank or shop with a genuine, pent-up grievance after trying unusuccessfully to resolve an issue elsewhere in the company. In these circumstances, about the worst thing staff can do is shrug it off with: "That's not my responsibility." Just because it didn't happen on your watch doesn't mean it's not your problem. Frontline staff, especially in banks, often end up having to resolve issues that began deep in the backrooms.

Aside from managing the customer from hell, Comeau has observed in her years of advising on the dark arts of keeping customers that many companies consistently under-rate customer service. They spend heavily on decor, products, financial management and marketing but far too little on the less glamorous but surely critical task of keeping and retaining clients.

It often comes down to internal marketing. For example, companies can fail to link marketing and frontline staff. "It's the frontline staff who lose or retain the customers," Comeau points out.

Comeau's conclusion: All marketing budgets should include a percentage devoted to customer service. If nothing else, that should reduce the frequency of customers from hell.

Air New Zealand has a similar system for managing difficult customers and it must be working - the reported incidence of air rage has been steady declining for the past few years.

Cabin staff are trained in conflict resolution along the Laugh lines to handle awkward passengers. They are taught to recognise potentially difficult passengers and to use what the airline describes as "appropriate communication skills" to forestall real trouble.

Top priority is to defuse a potentially explosive situation by resolving a grievance, genuine or otherwise, perhaps just by moving the passenger to another seat.

But if the cabin staff think a full-blown exhibition of air rage is looming, they can still head it off by warning that appropriate authorities will meet the plane on landing.

* Footnote: It was the great retailer H. Gordon Selfridge who came up with the slogan: "The customer comes first." But then he was born in America, where most of the customer literature originates.