Be Your Customer's Hero

CHAPTER 72

13 Go-To Tactics for Defusing Angry Customers

Few people enjoy working with angry or irate customers. It’s unpleasant, unfulfilling, and sometimes unmanageable. One of the reasons working with these customers is so difficult is that anger is a natural trigger for most people. We react to it in specific ways, and none of those ways are useful in customer service. In this chapter, we’re going to look at specific tactics for handling angry customers. As I mentioned in Chapter 71, none of the techniques are silver bullets; when you deal with an angry customer, you can expect to take some licks, but used calmly and wisely, they can help you succeed in situations where the great majority of service reps fail.

Let’s get started with a few ...