How to Deal with an Upset Customer

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you're new, welcome. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. In this video, we're going to talk about how to deal with an upset customer. So how do we deal with an upset customer? There's an unavoidable reality that within every relationship, we're going to be disappointed. We're going to have negative experiences. How we respond to that makes a big difference to how effective, how positive, and how healthy the relationship will be in the future. So I'm going to introduce to you a very simple 3-part framework to help you think through how to approach those particular situations and conversations with confidence. It's called BTO—behaviors, triggers, and outcomes—and we're going to look at those individually and then how they all come together. So let's start with B, which is behavior. Now, behavior that we see from people often is misinterpreted. It's misinterpreted because we've never really been taught how to view behavior in a healthy and proactive way. So what we want to do here is listen to the language, and if we begin to study social psychology and the understanding of human emotion, We understand that behavior shows up particularly when there is disagreement in two ways. One, it comes up in an unmet expectation. It also comes up when there is a value that has been violated from a moral perspective. So we understand these two dynamics, expectations and values. And so we have to really listen deeply to what our customer is saying. If our customer says they're disappointed, versus angry and frustrated. Those are two different kinds of behaviors that show up and emotions that sit underneath that. Our response to these makes a difference to how they hear us and what they hear from us and how likely they are to really respond positively to us as well. If we're not— if we're unable to identify an expectation versus a value. So then we move to the triggers. Once we've identified the behavior, we want to understand how this has actually happened. How do we get to this particular position? And here's where the skill of you asking really good questions and involving the customer is so important. We need to ask the customer to really walk us through, hey, can you help me, can you help me understand exactly how we got to the situation? How do we lead up to this particular disappointment, this anger, this feeling that you have? So we can really understand what might need to stop, what not— what might need to start or change in our relationship to really impact how we move forward together in a positive way. Get the customer involved in that conversation. Begin to go deeper because the clarity of that particular moment of of those triggers will help you to make good decisions inside your business. Once you've understood the triggers, you can then move towards the outcome. And the outcome is what then you do together based on the information you've just received. Once you have the outcome, we did now need to decide who's responsible for what. And guess what? You're gonna be responsible for a lot of this because you're the one owning the relationship. But we need to rearticulate back to the customer exactly what you've understood from them and what proactively will be done to help solve this or eliminate, to the degree in which you can, that thing happening again. So here's what we communicate back, and we say, Mr. Customer, this is what you've told me has happened. Here's how you felt, how you feel right now, and what hasn't been resolved. So here's what's going to happen. I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. In order for me to really support and escalate this with you and for you, I need you to document this, this, and this for me, or do X, whatever those things are for your business that makes it easy for you to re-communicate these particular situations in your business. We say it out loud with the customer. We let them know the process so they are comfortable and clear and confident about how you're resolving and dealing with their particular situation. It also demonstrates care and intent and that you've actually heard them accurately in that situation. Once you have it documented, you now have power to go back into the business with that repository of information and make some really good decisions around how to manage those relationships, around how to proactively move those relationships forward in a way that makes sense for the customer. So you can see that the BTO framework helps you to really easily navigate through this conversation, making sure the customer sits at the center and you are helping facilitate the emotion and the really kind of the charge of the situation that can sometimes feel really heavy to both parties in the conversation. You want to be able to facilitate that well, and the BTO framework helps you to move through the behaviors, the triggers, and then to positive outcomes that allows both you and the customer to move forward. Now, how do we put this together? Well, here's what we have for you: a guide in the link below. You can click on that, download the PDF. It gives you a complete walkthrough to how to use the tool and institutionalize it within your own business. Once you do, you then have the, really kind of the power to address any kind of situation with the customer and ensure that everybody in your team can feel confident and calm in those situations to deal with those negative and sometimes very difficult areas in your business. So if this is something that you really want to handle and handle well and make sure that you never have to deal with the repercussions of a poorly managed call, then download the link and ensure that you share this video Like and subscribe so other people can see it, and you can then have those positive experiences starting from today. And I'll see you in the next video.