Handling angry customers is the worst nightmare of any customer support team, however, majority of customers do not get angry for no reason. To reduce getting calls from angry customers, make sure to deliver what you promise. Your entire brand building is based on that assumption. Another big mistake many businesses do is to believe that anyone can become a customer support representative. Handling customers requires extreme patient and dedication that not all humans possess. Train your support team on how to behave and solve problems.
So, how do you handle angry customers?
To begin with, put in place an efficient support help desk system. It may cost you from $100 to few thousand dollars (depending on functionality) but it well worth the investment as all interactions with your customers will be in place, it will be easy to track back support issues, indentify problems with your support team and it will be hard to miss any support inquiry. Avoid using just an email platform; it just does not work in the long run.
The first thing that can make a customer angry and ruin your brand is to neglect the inquiry or avoid the problem. Your customer loses trust to your brand and then is very hard to gain it back. You will be most likely excused if you do not solve their problem but you will never be excused if you do not answer to their inquiry or accept the fact that your business made a mistake. Once you receive a ticket from an angry customer make sure that you reply back and acknowledge the issue. This will be the first step to calm the customer down. Does this mean that your businesses need to give in any time a customer is angry? Of course not but this is why not everyone can become an efficient customer support representative.
The next step is to very clearly understand the issue and find a solution to it as soon as you can. If you cannot solve the problem, apologize for the inconvenience and reimburse the customer for what it happened. This will give you a lot of extra points to his trust scale. Nevertheless, if you know your business very well, it will be almost impossible not to solve all your customers’ problems.
Back in 2006, when I launched an online file storage provider, I came across an almost devastating accident for our business. The server provider team had mistakenly deleted our servers’ data. We were lucky enough to have created a copy so it was not that harmful. What stroked our attention however was how the server provider handled the issue. Firstly, the person who made the mistake and deleted our data called me and apologized, later, we got a call from the CEO where he granted us with free usage of their service for the next five months.
Zappos.com the online retailer that was recently acquired by Amazon.com is well known for its superb customer support.
Angry customers can also be a very good tool of feedback for your business because they are willing to tell you what you are doing wrong, so you have a twofold reason not to avoid them.
