A short instructional YouTube segment by Mike Andes giving practical advice for handling angry customers: avoid text/email, prefer in-person or phone conversations, allow the customer to vent, do not match their speed or intensity, stay calm and focus on facts to resolve the root problem. Emphasizes that emotional escalation and arguing prevent resolution.
If you have a really angry customer, the last thing you should do is text or email them. It almost always gets mistaken and misunderstood, whether it be capitalizations or exclamation marks. Don't do it. It's going to get misconstrued and the customer is just going to get more mad. Ideally, you meet them in person or you give them a phone call. Now, when you get on the phone call, you've got to realize that they're going to be mad and they might be talking really fast and cutting you off. You do not want to match that level of intensity or speed of speech. And if you're talking really fast because they're talking really fast and they raise their voice, and so you raise their voice, you're just gonna get an argument. An argument never solves anything. If you wanna have an actual discussion and get to the root of the problem and solve their issue, you've gotta make sure that you let them vent, let them scream, yell, but do not match their speed and the pace at which they start going in faster and faster and getting louder and louder. Stay calm, stay collected, and get to the root of the problem instead of what happened and the facts. And I'm mad and don't get emotional about it. The person who gets emotional in an interaction is going to lose.
