How to handle an irate customer:
1. Listen
Hear the customer out. Do not turn them down or criticize them. Your customer has feelings too :(
2. Empathize
Put yourself in their shoes. Think about how you would want someone to help you if you were in their situation and you weren't handling it like a man.
3. Respond
Politely explain to the customer what you can do for them instead of loading a gun and shooting them.
4. Thank
Thank the customer for their business. The money is always right, bitch.
5. Turn in your spine
Congratulations, you're industry's receptacle for human misery and woe. This cycle of bending over and taking it is destructive to our culture and everyone is responsible.
Anyone who works in customer service knows the drill. If you have an irate customer, offer to rub their belly, kiss their booboos, and offer to make it all better. Poor diddums! Most customers know how to man up and take it, but some dysfunctional reprobates think they can get what they want by raising their voice and forgetting their manners. Some policies are absolute, and some policies are there because of a fucking law, but sometimes people are so stupid they think that a supervisor making slightly more than you will be able to change that.
When I started out in customer service, I was told to respect the customer. This offended me because I was felt I didn't need to be told to respect people. After a few years I had a realization that there is a huge similarity between irate customers and babies. They are throwing a tantrum to get their way. How are there full grown adults in the world who still have this behavior? It's confounding! A grown adult person is put in a situation that makes them dissatisfied and what seems to make sense in their heads is to respond by behaving very indignantly or obnoxiously. There are some really self righteous, vindictive people out their.
I think we can all agree that there is something psychologically wrong with these people. They are people who are entitled, have low self-esteem, or who have anger management issues. They probably go home and brag about how they gave you a piece of their mind and it doesn't occur to them that their behavior might not be healthy. I don't think that uneducated minimum wage workers are qualified to fix what is really wrong with these people, and that fact that the biggest and most powerful entities in the United States develop training programs to prepare customer service personel to capitulate to adult babies for their bottom line shows how little people appreciate psychological health.
Thanks for having my back, boss' boss' boss' boss' boss' boss' boss' boss. From where I'm sitting, the right thing to do empower employees to say "I want you to speak with my boss." Then the boss should say "sir/ma'am, you can't speak to my employees that way. Come back when you have an apology." If the irate customer can't grow up, they should be trespassed off the premises or hung up on. Society should stop tacitly encouraging and enabling this destructive behavior by ignoring it, tolerating it, permitting it, rewarding it, and by refusing to punish it. The enabling of this bad behavior is worse behavior than the behavior of the irate customer.
