How to handle customer complaints

This is the most underrated step toward dealing with a customer complaint (angry customer). You’re not going to be much help to the customers if you’re angry yourself. You can only begin to approach their problem with clear and calm communication to find a solution.

It’s very easy to get annoyed when a customer gets angry. Anger is such a natural emotion, and it’s very easy to fall prey to. However, you need to do everything in your power to control it and not let it take advantage of you.

Say a customer starts shouting, for example.

At first, you might take it personally and be defensive. Perhaps, you want to tell the customer how wrong they are to talk to you like that, or how hard you work. The anger can dwell inside of you.

During such times, a good move is to take a deep breath and take the time to actually listen to the customer. Try to understand what they’re saying. Behind all of those angry words is a message of the frustration and struggle the customer is dealing with. Perhaps, it has become so bad that they have found themselves taking it out on you.

The customer is a human, and understanding that little fact is the first step toward remaining calm in light of whatever they say to you while they are angry. Now that doesn’t mean you have to tolerate their behavior, but at least when you’re calm, you can smoothly escalate the manner to your manager. It’s hard for their anger to escalate when it is met with unperturbed calmness.

Behind all angry rants is a desire to be heard; to be listened to. When you pay attention to the customer and what they are actually saying, you will start to hear the message behind all of those angry words.

What, exactly, is making the customer so angry? Is it a matter that can be resolved? If it is, then you can do more than just try to get the customer to calm down. You can take the steps toward solving their issue for them. Solving their problem will make them a lot more satisfied. When you do all of this calmly and politely, the customer will walk away feeling heard and helped and probably more than a little ashamed about their outburst. They might even be the ones to apologize to you!

A good trick you can use when listening to the customer is to repeat what they say back at them. This helps you to make sure you totally understand what message they’re trying to convey. You can’t make any assumptions here. Try paraphrasing what they’re saying and ask them if that’s what they mean.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but is this what you’re saying?” – a good starter, before paraphrasing what they’re saying back to them.

Once you know you’re on the same page, it’s much easier to solve their issues. They’ll also feel heard.

When we’re angry, we’re rarely perfectly rational. We work according to some kind of mental heuristic at the time. We stop to objectively consider the facts at hand and resort to our own emotions to tell us how to deal with the situation. These emotions are determined by the problem, our mental state, and the particular situation we are in at the time. This is our effect, and it is like our internal mental algorithm that has been conditioned by past experience to react to situations in a particular way.

A customer might be angry about something because they’ve been in a similar situation before, and they never got any assistance. Thus, they might expect the same kind of treatment. A good approach would be to politely ask them why they’re angry so you can get at the bottom of the issue. Once you understand the cause of the anger, it’s much easier to solve their problem. Again, active listening is important here.

When a customer is angry, you want to build rapport with them with HR software as quickly as possible. One effective way to do this is to thank them for raising the issue. Acknowledge their patience with you as you solve the issue and thank them for taking the time to tell you about it. It makes them realize that you’re on the same team here, and they tend to dial down the aggression. This is another great trick to resolve customer complaints, which I found really helpful while working for a writing service.