If you weren’t so abrasive and rude, I would’ve refunded your money – even though we are under *no* legal obligation to do so.
I am now marking your email address as spam and your communication will no longer get through. If you don’t want to use our service any more, please cancel your account.
I have taken this conversation completely out of context because context doesn’t matter in customer service (the bold bits are mine, too). The only thing that matters is you keeping your cool, and this can frequently require having the patience of Job and less ego than a blade of grass. The above conversation is not one I would consider a good example of conflict resolution on the part of the representative who sent it. That was Ryan Carson of Dropsend, incidentally, and you can read the context on his blog post about it. Ryan asked publicly how other folks would have answered. Here is my response, and the rationale.
The initial stimulus:
Refund me the 5 dollars ASAP
This would set me looking in my transaction records, where I would find that the customer has just done an instantaneously upgrade/downgrade for a subscription service and been charged a pro-rated amount to the end of the month. Here is my response.
Thank you for using Dropsend [the name of the application at issue]. I received your message asking for a refund of $5, and have instructed our credit card processor to refund you. Is there anything else I can help you with?
What did that cost me? $5, thirty seconds of research time, and counting to five before allowing someone’s lack of civility to ruffle me. The $5 I will get back from this customer next month, and even if I don’t its $5 and that is below my care threshold as a business owner (or as anything, really). The research time was a sunk cost the moment he said “refund” because I have to check that he is a customer to be physically able to process a payment. The five seconds is the expensive bit for most people, because that requires suppressing your ego, and that can be irksome. Regardless, this response a) totally resolves the problem for the customer and b) keeps them happy and ready to pay me next month. As an actual bonus if the customer is having some support related issue they might email me back and allow me to fix it, improving the quality of my service for the thousands of customers I have who are not in on this email exchange. If they don’t mail me back, thats OK too — I’m doing things that matter for the business and not swapping a series of hostile emails with someone which will gain me nothing.
Oh, sure, you can go searching for a rationale on why allowing yourself an ego (I’m using this in the non-pejorative sense of the word) is a good idea. “They’ll walk all over me”. “We have a policy against this.” “If I do it for him I’ll have to do it for everybody”. Hogwash, irrelevent, and don’t care. The overwhelming majority of your customers in the software business will never ask for a refund or contact support (I’m talking about packaged software or services here which are substantially identical for all customers). Suppose some fraction of your support requests walk over you — so what? Support requesters make up a tiny fraction of your turnover every month, and a tiny fraction times a tiny fraction equals a “cost of doing business”. Your blood pressure is more important than that .1% of customers who want to wheedle over $5.
Another reason to kill this exchange after the first email is that it prevents escalation. Escalation is what takes you from “My, didn’t this chap’s mother ever teach him manners?” to “FINE! I DIDN’T WANT YOUR MONEY ANYWAY!” Its easy to see it in hindsight but, in the heat of the moment, most people don’t recognize they are doing it. As a result, you want to practice what the IR/polisci buffs call a commitment strategy — basically, you decide beforehand that if someone has an issue you are going to be obsequious about it. Obsequious. What a lovely word — did you know that there are several ways to say it in Japanese and that not all of them are considered negative? I often wish English had a word for when you need to be a spineless craven lickspittle in a good way. Learn from the Japanese, they have the “I can put a polite reserved face on this for the sake of our continued relationship even though I’m absolutely fuming on the inside” down to an art form. (That face is called tatemae, the feeling on the inside is called honne. There, you learned your bit of linguistic trivia for the day.)
See, if you start escalating, you will allow yourself to be drawn into an argument with your customer. You can win an argument with your boss. You can win an argument with your wife. You can even win an argument with God. But you will never win an argument with your customer. You might get the last word in, and puff out your chest, and then find that they cancel their subscription and/or chargeback you. And in the pursuit of a lousy five stinking bucks you’ve just lost a $50 revenue stream over the next year, which is almost pure profit because you are selling a software service which requires no marginal work, you’ve risked getting bitten for $15 by Visa when they chargeback and having to waste an hour of your life repeating the argument to a series of bored Visa representatives who are all thinking “Why did I sign up to do this job? Everyone acts like children” (you’ll lose the chargeback, by the way), and worst of all you’re stressed.
You might think you would be stressed if you suppressed your ego. True, for the first two weeks or so. After that it just becomes a habit. You learn to mentally shut out the torrent of abuse in your ear and skip over the written invective, and when you get a word in edgewise say “OK, what can I do to help?” Trust me, I worked in a call center — if you learn how to do this, you can work in a call center for your entire life and not get tired. If you don’t, you will burn out in a matter of months. Just pretend you’re like that character from Firefly who, when faced with a stressful situation, repeats a mantra: “I am a leaf on the wind. Watch me soar.” And, well, ignore the fact that those were his last words.
Ah, the company has a policy against refunds. Here is the great thing about running your own business: you are the boss. If your company has a policy against refunds, you can break it at will. Call it an exception, call it a special accomodation, call it a goodwill expenditure, call it whatever the heck you want — the policy is a few bits on a server somewhere. If you refund this customer, who will fault you for it? Certainly not your boss — you are the boss! And, as long as you’re the boss, why don’t you rewrite your policy against refunds saying that you’ll gladly give out refunds. Its the key to getting your fantastic customer service to scale. This chap you’re giving the refund to might tell a friend or write a blog post… of course, he’ll probably tell no one. However, a nice prominent guarantee like “We’ll refund your last payment anytime, for any reason.” gets seen by every prospect who is worried “Hmm, what if I’m not happy?”
Even if you have some darn good reason to be a Scrooge in print in your policy, don’t get trapped into the “If I make an exception once I’ll have to make an exception for everyone”. Says who? Your boss? You are the boss. Boolean propositional logic? You’re a businessman, not a computer programmer. If the accomodation advances your business goals make it, end of discussion. Your customers are an incestuous bunch but they mostly don’t talk about how easy it is to screw you over (mostly: in some markets they might. I hope you’re not doing business in those markets). Instead, they typically talk in terms of ecstatic, happy, and furious. If they never have a problem, they’re happy. If the last time they had a problem, you bent over backwards, they won’t think “This guy is a pushover!” (even though you are! And good for you!) but they’ll think “Wow, the service here is amazing!” And if you have a two year long relationship with a customer, without any previous bad incident, and then you send them one teensy-tinesy email saying “I would have refunded your money, but decided to keep it. Nyaa nyaa.”, now they’re furious. And they will never ever again be anything but furious.
I’m sorry your management is not supportive of good CS practices.
Keep your chin up though, even though some people are nasty on the phone many customers are nice. Try to find your own little rays of sunshine and remember them. I had my own favorites — some nuns from New York, a little six year old who always answered for “His Mommy who is a businesswoman and left me as Man of the House how can I help you”, etc. I can’t even remember any of the bad apples anymore — don’t put yourself on the phone with them, just send a fiction, a little puppet that dances to your whims and your script but doesn’t have feelings to hurt. They’re just saying bad words to a puppet. Silly people, the puppet doesn’t care.
[...] [MICROISV] How To Deal With Abusive Customers (microisvjournal.wordpress.com, 5 saves) [...]
[...] and not take it personally. This is absolutely key to running a worthwhile business, in my opinion. There’s nothing to be gained by winning an argument with your customer (that link is a poignant response to this post showing someone taking their customer’s [...]
*you can never win an arguement with a customer*…. I beg to differ!
I don’t know which world you live in, but that’s not how it works on planet earth.
I am in retail, and we do ear piercing where I work. We also do cartilage piercing, but certain state rules apply when a minor wants this done. They have to have a DPS I.D. card (NOT a driver’s license) and anybody of any age can get one of these. BUT they HAVE TO HAVE THIS, even when Mom or Dad are there to sign the paperwork. And I can’t tell you how many people have tried to get ugly over this, when they can just take their damn business somewhere else if they don’t want to abide by the law.
Last week, when I explained this to a woman, she got cocky and said, “You’re just getting smart now aren’t you?” I said calmly: “If you think so, but I don’t make these rules.” Then she said, “Well f*ck you too!” I told her she had three seconds to get to the door before I had security help her find it, and told her outside that she would not talk to me or any other sales associates in my store like that, and just because I worked there did not mean I had control over all the legal entities that applied to ear piercing. Furthermore, she was not allowed back in the store, if her shadow crossed the threshold, I would have her arrested immediately. An off-duty police officer happened to be in the store at the time this happened, and told the woman I had every right to press charges against her for her language if I chose to do so.
And guess what? Then manager AND corporate office took my side!
If she had been upset over something reasonable, that would’ve been different.
No employee has to lay down and take that. And I hate to break it to all you brown-nosers, but some customers DO personally attack you out of spite.
And if you don’t protect the people that work for you, you’re cutting you’re own throat.
Yes, you need customers and people with legit problems need to be helped every way they can, but when the customer is abusive, you need to think about your employees who are taking the flak. They don’t have to put up with it, and if you want to keep your business going, you’ll be smart and ensure this. Focus on the majority of people who are good customers (that does NOT mean frequent visitors), instead of the trash that live to make others miserable.
That may have been cathartic for you, but it accomplished nothing good for the business. It would have been markedly less good had the confrontation escalated into actually arresting her. There would a disruption of business and repeated losses of productive time by many members of your organization, all stemming over a trivial spat about a dirty word. (Manager and corporate getting involved in a routine customer service incident is already not exactly a stunningly great allocation of resources.)
Good for business? Her daughter didn’t have an ID, so there would not have been any business to begin with. I had another person working with me at that time, and business went on as usual inside. We even did 20% over last year’s goal that day. *Manager and corporate getting involved in a routine customer service incident is already not exactly a stunningly great allocation of resources.* Pretty good for a “high and mighty” who’s obviously never dealt with crap like this. For your info, I could care less who uses [the f-word] in the store as long as they’re not being abusive to or personally attacking other patrons or employees. If she had said, “Well that’s pretty [freaking] stupid,” in a tone that said “a little disappointed” rather than “raving [witch]” it would’ve been different. Not that I am obliged to justify my reaction to you. My whole point, since you obviously didn’t get it, was not putting up with abusive customers. There comes a point when they throw diplomacy out the window; DM’s and Territory Reps tell us this from the beginning. If they are abusive over a policy that stems from the goverment law enforcement over certain health risks, we have a ZERO tolerance stance toward it.
But since you didn’t know this, I guess all your statement boils down to is an ignorant opinion.
I apologize for censoring your post, but many of my customers use filtered internet connections and it would be unfortunate if they were unable to access my domain due to overzealous software filtering.
Regardless of whether that individual customer/prospect ever buys from you, there is the matter of your store’s image to consider. In general, my sense of things is that bickering with customers, even when you are in the right, does not inspire confidence in other customers. Customer service professionals actively despising customers, even the trying customers, is also probably not a great thing. Additionally, when the prospect retells the story to her friends, it is highly unlikely that she will end up sounding like the bad guy. Arrests happening in your place of business are, of course, always a negative.
I may be the boss around my own business*, but I’ve also been a lowly order entry clerk working the phones answering two hundred calls a day. I was subjected, infrequently in the grand scheme of things, to language of the sort which would make sailors blush. It only gets to you if you let it get to you. (* nota bene: Considering I’m the sole employee of my business, I get to be both “high and mighty” and also frontline support, at the same time. Its great fun.)
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. Its my considered opinion that it is less advantageous to your company’s bottom line than other alternatives, such as telling abusive customers some variation of “We are sorry that we cannot meet your needs today, but the government has tied our hands.”, and repeating that until they leave your store*. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, they can’t stay in your store all day trying to get a rise out of you.
* That is what you can do as an employee without the ability to set policy. If I were in charge of policy, I would apologize to them for the inconvenience, mention that the law ties my hands, and offer them a discount on the piercing after they had collected their ID card.
Sole employee, eh? Gee, I wonder why…..I’ve got news for you: I have people arrested quite often in my store (I can safely say twice a week on average), mostly for shoplifting and vandalism, and the occasional disorderly conduct. Somehow, we are still generating business and doing better all the time. My business happens to be family oriented and targeted toward a younger audience. I have repeat customers applaud me for my stance toward troublemakers, especially customers who refuse to be reasonable about certain circumstances.
Here’s something else to consider: telephone abuse is much different from someone being three inches from your nose threatening to “punch [you] into next week”. I also deal with physical thereats quite often, but it’s not going to make me change how I deal with abuse. Tough beans. You’re going to have to do better than that to convince me of your position; I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work most of the time.
(Nota Bene: [I also am proficient in Latin: imagine that!] People are going to have a negative view of your business if they insist on keeping their bad attitude regardless of how you handle their nonsense, especially when getting nasty doesn’t get their way. )
YOU might be concerned over that extra dollar, but I try to keep corporate greed out of the picture and focus on the *good* customers. Hasn’t failed in 10 years, and I don’t expect it to anytime. There’s always someone else to replace the jerk that vows to “never do business here again” when attempting manipulation does not get their way. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Something else, and this is just logical when you consider human nature: someone who throws that much of a fit over a silly I.D. card usually just gets the piercing done somewhere else, because taking a trip to The Department of Public Safety is “too much of a hassle.” I am not going to apologize for the inconvenience when it’s not my fault to begin with. No brown-nosing here.
But if *[you] were in charge*, you would’ve realized this.
You’re right, they can’t stay in my store all day trying to get a rise out of me–
I ensure that.
Your policy may be good for you, but don’t tell me it’s good for mine—because it isn’t.
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Here’s something else to consider: telephone abuse is much different from someone being three inches from your nose threatening to “punch [you] into next week”.
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On this point, we are in agreement. I would also call security for threats. It strikes me as a bit much, and mostly avoidable, for simple lack of civility and/or cursing.
Best of luck in your business endeavors.
I enjoyed your post!Keep up the great work!
Devin Willis