Defusing Difficult and Demanding Customers

Develop the skills and strategies to respond to angry and difficult customers by resolving issues confidently and appropriately.

Learn how to Handle Problem Customers whose difficult and demanding ways challenge customer service representatives at all levels. This onsite customer service seminar develops skills and techniques to provide quality service to difficult customers of all types.

Service representatives learn to avert tenuous situations and take appropriate steps to rebuild customer relationships.

This interactive training session is tailored to call center or face-to-face service environments. Examples, exercises and case studies are designed around your products and services.    

Research indicates that customers who complain are more willing to continue doing business with you, if they feel that they are being treated properly. Angry and complaining customers typically do not decide to take their business to the competition – until they talk to you. That’s why we train service representatives on what to say (and what not to say), how to defuse hostility, how to control emotions, how to use coping strategies, how to use tact and diplomacy and much more in this one-day session.

Whether the customer is loud and abrasive or on the verge of exploding with anger, customer service representatives leave this seminar with new skills and tools to handle them with greater confidence. They will have a heightened awareness of what drives customer needs and know how to adjust their service style to better relate to the customer and implement a service solution.

Does this sound familiar?

• Customer complaints are increasing
• Service representatives avoid and try to transfer difficult customers to someone else
• There is a lack of creativity in solving customer problems
• Service representatives are sometimes curt or “short” with clients who have problems
• Service representatives wish demanding customers would “just go away"
• Service representatives are sometimes afraid to deal with certain customers
• When challenged, service reps give away too much to make the problem go away
• The stress level in the service department or call center is increasing
• Service representatives have not been trained or need a refresher course on handling difficult and demanding customers

If the answer to any of the above is “Yes,” then this training is for you.

Who Should Attend

For service personnel with high profile, high-pressure public contact who need to handle difficult people better, resolve complaints faster, and cope with job stress and frustration.

Training Benefits

• Develop the techniques that can be adapted to your job, your personality and your customer
• Defuse difficult and demanding customers more successfully
• Increase customer loyalty by resolving complaints faster
• Transform customer conflict into customer cooperation 
• Decrease the number of lost customers due to the perception of poor service
• Improved confidence to handle any service situation
• Reduce the stress level of customer service employees 

Overview of Concepts and Deliverables Provided

• Understand the difference between a difficult customer versus an upset customer
• View your communication style from the eyes of the upset customer to minimize misperceptions or misunderstandings
• How a customer's service perceptions affect their emotions
• Develop the ability to have patience to stay calm and in control of your emotions
• Identify behaviors that may be contributing to customers becoming difficult or upset
• Effectively respond to unreasonable demands with phrases that calm people down
• Avoid turning a dissatisfied customer into an angry customer
• Project a professional image that expresses self-confidence
• Communicate with customers to avoid causing defensiveness
• Deliver bad news without overly upsetting the customer
• Listen for facts and not for feelings
• Eliminate your prejudices to be a better listener
• Use tact and diplomacy to handle the most difficult customers
• How to defuse emotional manipulators
• How to control loud and abrasive customers
• Use effective approaches to dealing with explosive and intimidating customers
• How to deal with the person who thinks they are “better” than you
• Deal with chronic complainer customers
• How to defuse hostility and anger
• How to respond to unreasonable demands
• Control customer emotions with phrases that calm people down
• Express empathy, not sympathy
• Make customers feel they have received quality service even when you can't give them everything they want
• Help customers who are “wrong” save face when their errors are found
• Enlist customer support and fix things that go wrong
• Practice the keys to exceeding customer expectations
• Avoid taking it personally when a customer is venting their frustration
• Implement stress busters that work

Dealing effectively with difficult customers will benefit your entire organization. The customer service skills developed in this session are often difficult to learn without specialized training.   
 

For more information on this or any of our other customer service training options, call toll free 877-385-5515.

Or you can email us at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..