LAY the ground before dealing with angry customers

I believe almost every article about dealing with angry customers approaches it generically, often using acronyms to describe a series of steps. And I genuinely understand. It’s hard for you to compile this into a tool, as dissatisfaction can come from a wide variety of factors and situations.

However, one thing that bothers me the most is when these steps don’t give clear directions on how to behave with angry customers. They mention generic things like “don’t answer back the customer, feel empathy, keep calm, calm them down” and this kind of stuff. I understand it’s hard, but I created a framework precisely to complement these contents or to help people like me, who like clear structures.

You can also listen to this lesson instead.

The basic structure of dealing with angry customers.

Here is what happens: if you’ll read articles about dealing with angry customers, you’ll find lists ranging from 3 to 20 steps on how to deal with dissatisfaction. I will outline here how the majority discusses the attendant’s behavior when dealing with customers.

The first steps involve emotional intelligence and a certain emotional distancing from what is happening. You should not take it personally and that the criticism or complaint is probably not directed at you, but at the company and product or service.

Your role in this first moment is to listen, investigate and not to judge. The worst thing you can do is to belittle what the customer is saying for not believing, wanting to correct them or whatever the reason. Your position now is to listen to your customer.

Then, you should empathize or sympathize, apologize and promote the solution, offering options, being accountable and following up on implementation.

The LAY the Ground framework doesn’t steer away from itl. My goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but to provide a model you can follow with questions and phrases directed to each situation.

Knowing the LAY the Ground framework to deal with angry customers.

The LAY the Ground framework divides the service with unhappy customers in three stages: Listen actively, Address the real issue and You don’t discuss emotions. Each of these moments comes with strategic questions and phrases for you to be capable to direct your service and your customers.

Your first touch point should be focused on giving all the attention your customer deserves. There are three questions you must answer: How to give them the benefit of the doubt? What do they want to tell you? What is their frustration?

1) Listen actively: making the first call.

To give the due attention to your customer, you will need a series of skills already mentioned in this series and also in several customer service articles. Active listening, patience and emotional intelligence. You need to get the most out of the situation and be able to let yourself get affected as little as you can by it or even by how the person on the other end is behaving.

The first step will be to give them the benefit of the doubt. What does it mean? That you must first trust your customer is speaking out of a genuine conflict with the product, and not because they are a petty person. Believe me, there’s a tendency from a lot of attendants to discredit the customer, accusing them of not understanding how the product works, of not reading all the help documents and for being unwilling.

Some ways I use to distance myself from the situation and to get closer to the client is by making statements:

• Tell me what happened, I’m here all ears.
• Could you explain to me what happened, my job here is to help you.
• Thanks for telling me this happened, we need this kind of feedback to get better. Could you elaborate…

Practicing active listening:

That way, you put yourself more on the side of your client, you remove yourself from the “enemy” side of the equation and still manage to understand the situation better. Active listening involves asking in the same intensity as listening. So, try more to make sense of what your customer is talking about. What’s their problem? This you will get by asking questions.

• By telling me this, what did you find it that was upsetting? I’m asking this to check if I’m on the right track.
• But when they contacted you, it was more about how they spoke to you?
• The information they gave you was clear, it’s that they seemed angry?

Finally you need to confirm you understood the real cause. Notice here, although you are putting an effort in making the person comfortable to vent and comment on their dissatisfactions, you are moving away from emotions and walking towards talking more about the actual events. But this must be done in a subtle and natural way. Here are some questions that can be asked to ensure you understand what the person is talking about:

• So, your main issue is that you found the process cumbersome and difficult to follow?
• Besides being late, the food was cold?
• So, the information itself was not the issue, but the agent seemed angry in your point of view?

2) Address the real issue: focusing on the solution.

For you to move towards a solution, you need to focus on the issue at hand and reinforce your intention to solve it, taking action. You will do this in three ways: saying you noticed the frustration, giving the best options and confirming the suggested course of action is appropriate.

The first step has a lot to do with empathy. As I said in a previous lesson and just to reinforce it here, it doesn’t matter if you are empathetic. You must show that you do care. You need to give care to people.

Do it with phrases like:

• I know it’s upsetting when you’re trying to reset your password and the email doesn’t arrive in your inbox.
• It’s a bummer when you have to decide between two events and to cancel one of them.
• No one wants to deal with an angry attendant for no reason. I’m sorry about that.

It is important for you to elaborate well how you will show empathy. You should make it clear that you care and that it’s relevant to you. A model that I use is even having phrases ready for me to look at. Because sometimes if you speak off the cuff, you may sound like you care less than the customer believes they deserve.

Going to action:

Even if the customer is angry, if they understand and believe that you care, the phrase “ok, but what are you going to do?” may come next. For that, the next step is to suggest actions and paths to be taken. It happens by outlining the options he or she has. Examples of phrases you can use:

• When this happens…We have three options here…
• For cases just like yours, there are two ways of getting this fixed…
• These are the three ways of getting this solved quickly…

It is always important to point out somehow that you are giving the best options, exploring further some characteristics that fit better with the context — such as speed, efficiency, lower cost, etc. — and that these solutions are specific to it.

Then, you have to confirm with the person that that decision is the most appropriate. You can do it by reiterating the course of action, the steps or, if it’s a simple decision, commenting at the end of the message something like “How do these options seem to you?”. Or even “If you choose one of the options, will you feel better?” and “Do these options seem to settle the matter for you?” It is key to get these validations from your customer.

3) You don’t discuss emotions: keeping focus.

One point that not every script helps you understand is that many times when dealing with angry customers, they will not follow along your step by step and be guided by your way of doing things. It’s an impromptu, real-life conversation. The person doesn’t know that you’re following a script. Well, if they do, it’ll be bad for you.

So we must prepare for when the conversation gets off track. Your goal here is to be aware, because the probability is high that this will happen, and to manage the situation and get back on track.

It’s important to stress the importance that your customer has for you.

There are a few issues that can happen during your interaction with your customer. But almost always your client will go around and get back to talking about their feelings, repeat how your company failed in the process and how they were expecting something different from you. These are the factors that happen the most and that affect people’s emotions. Therefore, in such cases, you must reinforce how you understand the person’s side.

Some key messages to say are:

• I appreciate you telling me this, I know it’s a nuisance to bring this up.
• Thank you for taking your time to give us your feedback.
• I value your effort in telling me this.

It would be nice even to empathize by giving examples, to sound more personal and that you, individually, also care about the subject. Of course, this depends on how your company handles the matter. Phrases like “It has happened to me too and I felt like this…” and “There was a time when a customer asked me the same thing and we dealt with it that way….”. These can be good answers.

Steer away from discussing emotions.

One of the points that I strongly advocate is that emotions are not up for negotiation. There is no way you can ask someone to take away some of the anger they had in exchange for a benefit. Or more understanding, or to lessen their sadness if you do such a thing, and the like. There’s no negotiation. You can try to understand from them if an action has a chance to bring some positive reaction, but you do not remove feelings from the past.

Therefore, a posture that you should give up on your interactions with dissatisfied customers is to try to invalidate their emotions or even make them realize that “it’s not that big of a deal”. Here, I don’t even have a sentence to give you, you have nothing to say. You should go back to the previous step, consent, apologize and move on to talk about actions, giving alternatives. You may review the content on the Care and Attention framework to see how you can treat your customer.

Dealing with angry customers daily.

The hardest part of dealing with angry customers is because customers don’t follow your script. It’s also the part my agents also suffered the most with. They vary a lot in behavior, with complex emotions. Situations may be slightly different from each other enough to throw your script and training up in the air. This happens if you have been training to deal only with specific situations.

I created the LAY the Ground framework to teach you how to deal with these situations with clear examples. Cool? I don’t know if the “better than that, just twice that” line fits here. In customer service, especially in more delicate situations, less is more. The important thing is that you show a lot of humility and a genuine desire to help your customer. Note that I said “show” and not just feel like it.

The article’s treasure:

In the end of each article, I will write a final recap for you to memorize the main takeaways.

This is what I presented in this article:

• We got to know the LAY the Ground framework, which is used when dealing with angry customers. LAY is an acronym for Listen actively, Address the real issue and You don’t discuss emotions.
• “Listening Actively” is the moment for you to listen to your client, practice active listening, and ask questions.
• “Address the real issue” has to do with you recognizing what the customer wants, what their frustration is. And giving suggestions to them, confirming that they believe that your options will solve their problem.
• “You don’t discuss emotions” is a kind reminder that your customer will likely not follow your script. They will probably get back on expressing their feelings about the subject — which is okay. But you should be aware that you can’t discuss emotions, even they are not up for negotiation. Acknowledge it, show empathy and get back on track.

In the next lesson, we will cover emotional intelligence in customer service. This is an important skill to talk about right after dealing with these more complex items. We will cover what it is and how you can better understand your emotions and manage them.

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Always look both ways. See you in the future.