Customer conflict arises frequently, especially in dynamic, fast-paced environments. Working with an angry customer comes with the territory of doing business, but it can lead to increased stress for workers and diminished brand loyalty for customers. There is good news – you can turn conflict around. In fact, sometimes a corrective experience for an upset customer can lead to them becoming one of your more loyal patrons. This is a fragile endeavor, though, so taking the right steps in customer service conflict resolution is of the utmost importance. Below is a brief step-by-step guide to understanding and implementing conflict resolution for customer service agents.
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Whether you’re the manager tasked with keeping the peace or one of the many customer service agents who face conflict on a regular basis, following these steps can lead to quicker and longer-lasting customer service conflict resolution.
1. Stay Calm
The most professional way to handle an upset customer is to refrain from getting upset yourself. This can be a challenging task, especially if the customer is highly dysregulated and insults start to become personal.
Remaining calm is the best way to meet your frustrated customer where they are without escalating the situation, but staying calm isn’t always easy to do. Here are some tips for remaining calm in these moments:
- Breathe: It may sound silly but slowing yourself down to take a few deep breaths can make all the difference in how you respond.
- Take some physical space: If the angry customer is in-person and enters your personal space, take a few steps back. You won’t be successful in remaining calm if you feel physically threatened, so give yourself some room.
- Notice your own emotions: Recognize what you’re feeling in the moment. You don’t necessarily need to act on it but naming fear, anxiety, or frustration can help quell the overwhelm of these emotions so they don’t start speaking on your behalf.
- Call in an alternative: If you’re the manager, it’s probably your job to de-escalate customers. But if you’re able to get a colleague to sub for you temporarily while you collect yourself, it could help in the long run. This should be someone who hasn’t been trying to manage this conflict since it began; that way, s/he might be just far enough away from the matter that they don’t get overwhelmed by it. So take a few minutes and come back with some fresh ideas.
2. Validate Your Customer
Whether or not you agree with an agitated customer isn’t really important. To de-escalate someone who’s ineffectively expressing anger, you’ll need to be kind and respectful to them. Tell them you hear what they’re saying, even if it doesn’t really make sense to you. Remember, if they are emotional they are probably not being totally logical at that moment.
It’s easy to sound condescending, especially if you’re trying to rush through this part to get to your side of the story. That could reverse any potential positive outcomes. Instead, take the time to hear your customer’s concerns and let them know you’re listening. Showing them that what they say matters can not only de-escalate someone in a heightened emotional state, it can also be the foundation from which you build a long-lasting customer once the problem is resolved.
3. Don’t Take it Personally
One of the quickest ways to reach customer service conflict resolution is to ensure you’re not taking anything personally. It might be hard not to take things personally whether or not the angry customer is overtly trying to make it personal. Your task — and it’s a tall one — is to stay above it.
One of the reasons it’s important to separate yourself from the customer’s comments is because if you feel you have to defend yourself, any calming, validating cool-headedness that could resolve the conflict goes right out the window. You might start lashing out in return, and that doesn’t lead to an effective ending.
4. Avoid Arguing
One of the most important conflict resolution tips for customer service reps is to avoid opposition. Despite all of your urges to prove a wrong customer wrong, resist. Fact-checking emotions is a surefire way to turn a small rupture into an all-out war. Wait until tensions have loosened and emotions become regulated before you start using evidence against them if you need to at all.
When you take their attacks personally and become defensive, you react impulsively. Likewise, if the customer feels invalidated by your trying to prove them wrong. Be flexible, let go of being right, and work toward a collaborative solution rather than opposing them in order to make a point.
5. Be Gentle
Dialectical Behavior Therapy has a skill called GIVE. It stands for Gentle, Interested, Validate, Easy manner. A skill used to improve interpersonal effectiveness, GIVE is meant to serve as a reminder that it’s not just our words that can make or break an argument. How we deliver those words can greatly change the interaction. Customer service agents have to implement this skill on a much more frequent basis and might use it to mitigate conflict before it even begins. It’s a simple concept made simpler if you consider how you preferred to be spoken to, especially when you’re upset.
By being gentle and using an easy manner, you’re being mindful of your tone of voice, body language, and vocabulary. Instead of hurling curse words at a frustrated customer, posturing toward them to assert your authority, or using a short tone, try being more open, friendly, and kind. Smile, even if you’re not feeling particularly inspired. Using these skills just might lead the customer to put some faith in you.
6. Be Assertive
Validating emotions is important and should be one of the first steps in de-escalating someone who’s upset. However, setting containment is also important. This means not letting the customer walk all over you in their rage and upset. Assert your boundaries as a company representative and as a human being.
Note the difference between assertive and aggressive. Avoid being forceful in your boundary-setting, but be sure you’re maintaining your self-respect. Be kind but firm and use compassion as a means to set an expectation.
7. Take Responsibility
Whether or not an apology is in order, it’s a worthwhile approach to take responsibility for the disruption when you can. Chances are that the company was responsible for some part of the ordeal, even if it was poor communication, false advertisement, or unsatisfactory customer service. Apologize where an apology is due and don’t let your pride stand in the way of making amends. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and think about what you’d like to hear if you were them. After all, we are all customers of some sort to various brands.
Taking responsibility isn’t only about owning up to where you may have contributed to the problem but also how you’re going to manage the solution. Let your customer put faith in the fact that you will handle it so they don’t feel so alone.
8. Focus on a Solution
Once emotions have been validated and addressed, it’s time to move past it. Working collaboratively with a customer to determine the right solution can be just the positive piece of productivity everyone’s been waiting for. Build upon what you just learned from hearing your customer’s grievances. Offer what you can to bridge the gap between them and the company and to limit future frustrations.
Pollack Peacebuilding works with individuals, groups, and partners to collaborate on solutions to common customer service conflict resolution needs. Let Pollack Peacebuilding support your brand-customer journey toward a place of mutual understanding and longevity.
If you work with others, sooner or later you will almost inevitably face the need for conflict resolution. You may need to mediate a dispute between two members of your department. Or you may find yourself angered by something a colleague reportedly said about you in a meeting. Or you may need to engage in conflict resolution with a client over a missed deadline. In organizations, conflict is inevitable, and good conflict management tools are essential.
What is conflict resolution, and how can you use it to settle disputes in your workplace?
Conflict resolution can be defined as the informal or formal process that two or more parties use to find a peaceful solution to their dispute.
A number of common cognitive and emotional traps, many of them unconscious, can exacerbate conflict and contribute to the need for conflict resolution:
• Self-serving fairness interpretations. Rather than deciding what’s fair from a position of neutrality, we interpret what would be most fair to us, then justify this preference on the bases of fairness. For example, department heads are likely to each think they deserve the lion’s share of the annual budget. Disagreements about what’s fairlead to clashes.
• Overconfidence. We tend to be overconfident in our judgments, a tendency that leads us to unrealistic expectations. Disputants are likely to be overconfident about their odds of winning a lawsuit, for instance, an error that can lead them to shun a negotiated settlement that would save them time and money.
• Escalation of commitment. Whether negotiators are dealing with a labor strike, a merger, or an argument with a colleague, they are likely to irrationally escalate their commitment to their chosen course of action, long after it has proven useful. We desperately try to recoup our past investments in a dispute (such as money spent on legal fees), failing to recognize that such “sunk costs” should play no role in our decisions about the future.
• Conflict avoidance. Because negative emotions cause us discomfort and distress, we may try to tamp them down, hoping that our feelings will dissipate with time. In fact, conflict tends to become more entrenched, and parties have a greater need for conflict resolution when they avoid dealing with their strong emotions.
Given these and other pitfalls, how can you set up a constructive conflict resolution process when dealing with conflict at work and other realms? Conflicts can be resolved in a variety of ways, including negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and litigation.
• Negotiation. In conflict resolution, you can and should draw on the same principles of collaborative negotiation that you use in dealmaking. For example, you should aim to explore the interests underlying parties’ positions, such as a desire to resolve a dispute without attracting negative publicity or to repair a damaged business relationship. In addition, determine your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA—what you will do if you fail to reach an agreement, such as finding a new partner or filing a lawsuit. By brainstorming options and looking for tradeoffs across issues, you may be able to negotiate a satisfactory outcome to your dispute without the aid of outside parties.
• Mediation. In mediation, disputants enlist a trained, neutral third party to help them come to a consensus. Rather than imposing a solution, a professional mediator encourages disputants to explore the interests underlying their positions. Working with parties both together and separately, mediators seek to help them discover a resolution that is sustainable, voluntary, and nonbinding.
• Arbitration. In arbitration, which can resemble a court trial, a neutral third party serves as a judge who makes decisions to end the dispute. The arbitrator listens to the arguments and evidence presented by each side, then renders a binding and often confidential decision. Although disputants typically cannot appeal an arbitrator’s decision, they can negotiate most aspects of the arbitration process, including whether lawyers will be present and which standards of evidence will be used.
• Litigation. In civil litigation, a defendant and a plaintiff face off before either a judge or a judge and jury, who weigh the evidence and make a ruling. Information presented in hearings and trials usually enters the public record. Lawyers typically dominate litigation, which often ends in a negotiated settlement during the pretrial period.
In general, it makes sense to start off less-expensive, less-formal conflict resolution procedures, such as negotiation and mediation, before making the larger commitments of money and time that arbitration and litigation often demand. Conflict-resolution training can further enhance your ability to negotiate satisfactory resolutions to your disputes.
What conflict resolution methods have you tried before? Leave us a comment.