Category: Call Center De-Escalation

De-escalation by myragolden

5 Reasons Why You’re a Rookie At De-escalating

bored young female professional working for a call center

Inflammatory words and an aggressive tone heat up an interaction like an oven heats up a room. The five biggest mistakes I see customer service professionals make when talking to upset customers are:

Aggressive tone – A direct or authoritative tone will quickly lead to an escalation in aggression or to a supervisor.

Making threats – Spitting off, “Calm down or I can’t help you” will assuredly not make a customer calm down.

Repeating your point – Repetition doesn’t make your point stronger. It annoys, or worse, infuriates your customer.

Pushing back – Getting aggressive or hostile because your customer pushes you shows weakness, and your customer will push harder.

Playing the antagonist role – Disagreeing and pointing out where your customer is wrong intensifies the interaction.

Let’s walk through the five big rookie mistakes, and see how an all-star would handle each of these situations.

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De-escalation by myragolden

The Fastest Way to De-escalate Is To Use Your Customer’s Last 3 Words

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When you have an enraged customer on the phone or in front of you, nothing threads the needle like mirroring the customer’s words. Copying the customer’s angry expressions makes the customer feel heard and understood. When the unreasonable customer feels like you’re listening is when they go from a boil to a simmer.

There are only three things you have to remember to do with mirroring.

  1. Copy the last three words the customer mouths
  2. Pause for a beat
  3. Repeat

Mirror the customer’s last three words

The most critical part of mirroring to de-escalate is to merely repeat back the last three words (or the critical one to three words) your customer mouthed, and put a question mark in your voice.

I learned the three-word technique from former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss in his book, “Never Split the Difference: Negotiate Like Your Life Depends On It.”

Let me walk you through this.

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Call Center De-Escalation by myragolden

The Reason Your Employees Can’t De-escalate

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Everybody thinks to train employees on the company’s applications and products and to give them basic phone skills. But very few people in customer service actually get the training they need to get an angry customer to back down, politely control conversations with ramblers and skillfully handle the customer who demands to speak with a supervisor. I want to talk to you about why your employees can’t seem to de-escalate intense interactions.

Three Reasons Your Employees Can’t De-escalate

1. If You Push a Customer, They’ll Push Back

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Customer Experience Design by myragolden

Three Proactive Things You Can Do to Pre-empt an Escalation with a Customer

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Tomorrow morning I’m headed to Phoenix to deliver a workshop at the Salesforce Trailblazers for the Future Conference. I booked an extra night at the Arizona Biltmore because I wanted some “me time” for relaxation and reading. I do this often, adding a day or two to a business trip to chill, explore, and enjoy local restaurants. Do you take time just for yourself?

Before I wrap things up in my office today and prepare for tomorrow’s early flight, I’m sharing with you three things you can do to pre-empt an escalation with a customer. These tips will help you handle interactions to significantly minimize the chance of a customer becoming so incensed that they feel they have to talk to a supervisor.

1. Reflect Your Brand Promise

One of my clients is a furniture protection plan company. A point of upset for many of their customers is when they discover that the damage to their furniture is not covered under warranty. Customers get intensely agitated because they feel what they purchased is not the same as the service they receive. I encouraged agents in this company to reflect the brand promise in every interaction. I had them focus on explaining first what the protection plan covered and then quickly going over a few of its many benefits.

Instead of merely telling the customer that their damage was not covered, I instructed agents to say something like,

“You have an excellent plan here. It covers such things as scratches and broken pieces. In this case, we do not cover discoloration of the leather, as fading is a natural occurrence that comes from body oils and usage. If anything else should come up, though, please give us a call, and we’ll be happy to look into things for you.”

Reflecting the brand promise, in this situation, is reminding the customer of the many benefits the protection plan does offer and by serving customers with a friendly demeanor.

2. Don’t Push

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Call Center De-Escalation by myragolden

Do These Three Things to De-escalate Immediately with Customers

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I overheard one of my employees saying to an upset customer, “Sir, I work in our corporate office. I had nothing to do with the problem you’re talking about.”

She attempted to get the customer to calm down. But you know what? That didn’t calm the customer. Her words made the customer even more intense.

I pulled my employee aside, and I explained to her that she was escalating the situation with the very words she hoped would get the customer to back down.

The thing is, with de-escalation you have to take action in the present to move toward a calmer state, and toward a solution. You can’t fight fire with fire like my employee was trying to do, you have to be the water that puts the fire out.

De-escalation requires you do three things. You have to create calm with a customer who is agitated; you need to assertively take charge of the situation to pre-empt more intense emotion, and, you must move the interaction forward.

1. Create Calm

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Difficult Customers by myragolden

7 Things You Can Say to Gain Control with Challenging Customers

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If you find it difficult to get your customer to stop telling you the story of just how inconvenienced they were, or are, and to stop rambling on about the problem, it’s likely because the customer is stuck in the past.

You’re going to have to reframe the issue in the customer’s mind. That is, you must strategically move your customer out of a past problem to a focus on the present so that you can offer a solution. Your job, in essence, is to get the customer to move on.

Reframing statements are fantastic in getting the customer to move forward. Reframing does two things for you. First, it acknowledges your customer’s biggest concern. You empathize. Secondly, it ushers in the solution phase of problem resolution.

Here are seven reframing statements that recognize customer concern and help customers move on.

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Customer Experience Design by myragolden

Do You Have Trouble De-escalating Angry Customers? If So, Try This.

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Four minutes into the call and I could see I was heading for trouble. The customer was a storyteller and a rambler. Plus, she was mad. She’d already spoken to an employee in the field and to one of my employees at the corporate office. Now the call had come to me. I got the call literally just as I was picking up my book to head to the park to enjoy a quick lunch and hopefully a couple of chapters of my novel.

The problem was easy enough. The customer’s rental car had broken down. That happens every day in the world of car rentals. Our solution to this problem is always swift: we get a replacement car out to the customer, reimburse any expenses and tow back the original rental.

But with this customer, the conversation was anything but easy. She kept rambling on, rehashing her frustration, making sure I knew how difficult it was to be stranded on the side of the interstate with 3 small children. If I was going to help the customer and have any shot at enjoying my lunch and a little reading, I had to resolve the problem and wrap up the call quickly.

So, here’s what I did. I used what Robert Bacal, a brilliant consultant, calls the topic-grab approach. The topic-grab approach involves listening carefully to your upset customer and then taking something they’ve said (grabbing a topic) and commenting on it or asking a question about it. This is especially effective if you can express empathy on the topic you “grab.”

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Customer Experience Design by myragolden

3 Expert Tips to Pre-empt an Escalation with a Customer

Women with headsets working at a call center

I remember being a new manager preparing to deliver bad news to a group of executives. I was nervous, fearing I would get questions I couldn’t answer and thinking I’d get slammed in the meeting. My boss, the executive vice president of the company, helped me prepare for the meeting.

“Here’s the strategy you use. You go in there and answer their every question before they even have a chance to ask you anything. This is what politicians, CEOs, and law enforcement officers do in every high-pressure press conference.” And then he walked me through the 3 steps that politicians and CEOs use. We even sat there and role-played in his office.

Three weeks later, I delivered the dim news to a group of 68 executives, all men. And it went well. To my shock and relief, there were no flaring tempers and no questions I couldn’t easily handle. There were very few questions. Using the 3 steps my boss had shared with me, I was able to pre-empt an escalation. Thank God!

Thrilled with the results I got in that meeting, I shared the 3 steps with my employees who worked in customer care. I thought the steps could help them pre-empt escalations with our demanding customers, and they did!

In this article, I’m going to share with you the 3 steps politicians and CEOs use to pre-empt an escalation—the same 3 steps my employees used to successfully pre-empt escalations to supervisors and to pre-empt escalations in aggression. Using these steps, you’ll be able to create calm, prevent an escalation, and be in complete control with demanding customers.

Here are the 3 steps:

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Customer Experience Design by myragolden

Make Sure Your Language Doesn’t Invite Escalation

Women with headsets working at a call center

I blocked off yesterday afternoon to listen to a random sample of recorded phone calls between customer service representatives and customers (patients and providers) for my client. I’m preparing to deliver a full-day De-escalation workshop to this group in a couple of weeks.

One of the things I noticed is that some of the employees have a tendency to use language that opens the door for escalations. It’s unintentional. I’m sure of that. The workers are overwhelmed, if not stressed. Their customers can be difficult. To try to control conversations, provoking language is sometimes used. I hear things like:

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