Rise Above the Difficult Customer: Serving While Earning Respect

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Rise Above the Difficult Customer Serving While
Earning Respect

• Christopher Gill, Director, ITS Project
  Management Planning, Gonzaga University
• Marilu Goodyear, Professor and ECAR Fellow,
  University of Kansas

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Three aspects to the response

• Focus on specifics of What Happened?
• Focus on feelings
• Yours
• Theirs (identity maybe challenged)

3
What Happened?

• Explore the story
• It is not about who is right, learn to sidestep
• Seek data--Can you tell me more about why you
  believe that?
• Resist the temptation to assign intent
• Focus on feelings behind
• Research on customer satisfaction shows
• How you treat someone is more important than
  getting it right
• High satisfaction accompanies respect for the
  service provider

4
Feelings are at the core

• In order to do a good job you must feel respected
• You must own your feelings
• Your feelings are as important as their feelings
• You must find a way of processing them
• Feelings are based on perceptions
• Perceptions are always subject to change, you can
  think your way to changed feelings

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Important to Own Your Own Feelings

• Use I statements
• Action Neutral description of the
  actions/behavior
• Focus on specific observable facts
• Not traits
• Impact Statement of the effects (can be both
  negative and positive) on others
• Outcome Your (and others) feelings about the
  behavior and result for person

6
Blame and Contribution

• Avoid Discussions of Blame
• Focus on Contribution
• Problem-solving You and me against the problem
• What contributed to this happening?
• When it is out of your control
• You are the middle person.
• Express regret and hopefulness about systems that
  are not designed for the user