Ideally, successful businesses do not just sell their products and/or services, but they also know how to deal with difficult customers. Nowadays, the quality of customer care services in every business entity is what differentiates it from its rivals.
How to Deal With Difficult Customers
Indeed, business entities with poor customer care services and those who do not know how to handle difficult customers risk losing profits, revenues, and in worse case conditions, they might go out of business.
Types of Difficult Customers
However, before analyzing some of the best ways of dealing with such kind customers or clients, it is ideal if you understand exactly who this ‘difficult customer’ really is. In most cases, difficult customers present themselves in several varieties, which include the following:
- Impatient customers
- Angry customers
- Intimidating customers
- Demanding customers
- Talkative customers
- Indecisive customers
Several ways on how to deal with difficult customers
Now that you understand the variety of difficult customers, you’re in a better position to handle them. The big issue is how to effectively deal with such personalities. Well, there are several good ways recommended to deal with any kind of difficult clients or customers, which include the following:
#1. Deal With Them Professionally
First and foremost, you must realize that you cannot be a position to handle or control the behavior of every other customer that comes to your business premise. Ideally, human beings can only have control only their own actions.
Therefore, you must be prepared professionally and psychologically to deal with any kind of difficult customer. Indeed, at this stage, you must have the capacity to influence the different responds for every other customer who comes to your business premise with different a degree of difficulties.
#2. Always control yourself
Ideally, you are asked not to argue with customers when they are displeased, angry, or those who keep on complaining. If you allow a client or a customer to push you on the walls, and you eventually lose control of yourself, it will definitely mean that you have lost control of the current situation.
Always remember that you can easily lose a good client or customer if you show irritation, displeasure, boredom, or even disdain. Therefore, you must get control of yourself at all times to be a better position to handle any type of a difficult customer.
#3. Listen to their queries
Those who listen to the queries of their difficult customers usually come up with the ultimate option(s) to solve their issues without affecting business activities (sales). As stated earlier, you are advised not to try to talk or argue over with a difficult customer.
You are required to give them humble time to have their say while you listen attentively, even if you know that what they are saying is not correct. During that time, try as much as possible to come up with quick and reasonable solution(s).
#4. Build a stunning rapport through empathy
Ideally, you are supposed to put yourself in the shoes of your difficult customers. As you listen carefully to their issues, you have to take the same opportunity to build a strong rapport with them. Thereafter, you are recommended to respond to their frustrations and show them that you clearly understand their situations and positions. Ideally, if you can ultimately identify yourself with customers’ issues through empathy, they will definitely calm down.
#5. Lower your tone and voice
There are some situations when a difficult customer gets louder when you are trying to sweet talk him/her just because they want to be noticed by other customers. In such a case, you are supposed to speak to him or her more slowly or in a lower tone.
Indeed, your calm demeanor will definitely reflect on them, and within a few minutes, they will settle/calm down. Therefore, any salesperson that encounters such a kind of customer should approach the case with a clear mind, calm, and remain unaffected by the client or customer’s volume and/or tone.
#6. Never get upset or angry
There are some situations when customers are so violent, verbally abusive, or keep on swearing that they will never set their foot on your business premise. In such a case, you are advised to take a deep breath and assume as if you did not hear anything abusive. In other words, you are not supposed to get upset and engage in exchange of similar words.
Ideally, responding in any kind will never solve the current problem; instead, it will worsen the situation in the far negative direction. The best solution to deal with such a kind of situation is to remind the customer that you are there to offer them the best help you could- in most cases, this simple statement will always help to defuse the situation.
#7. Do not blame the company or the customer
In most cases, when you are trying to explain the policies of your business that a customer has failed to understand or when you are trying to clarify something that went wrong, you are advised to avoid blaming either the business/company or the customer. It is not ideal to acknowledge that your company/business is to be blamed for something that went wrong. You can easily be sued! Instead, you are required to use an indirect approach by posing simple leading questions.
#8. Try as much as possible to solve difficult-customer’s problems or get someone else who can do it.
Even if the duty of dealing with customers’ problems is not part of your work, never ever reveal that to any customer. As long as you are dealing with the company’s customers, either directly or indirectly, you must have the facts about the entire business so that you can perfectly deal and/or help any customer any time, even without the need for a customer care representative.
Ideally, before you offer the best solution to a difficult customer, you are required to ask him/her how he/she would like the issue to be resolved. Thereafter, offer him/her some of the best possible choices. Otherwise, if you find that you can’t be in a position to help/resolve some of the customer’s issues, you can confidently refer them to someone who is calmer, who knows more, or someone who has more authority and powers (like the manager) in dealing with such issues.
Conclusion
The ultimate goal of the above options is to instill trust among your customers, retain them, and convert those who had negative notions towards your business so that as the business-day ends, you will have gotten more customers and of course more profits and revenues to meet your set goals and business objectives. If you apply any or all of the above options to the latter, the question of how to deal with difficult customers will be a thing of the past.
