Who’s being difficult, you or your customer?
How would it impact upon you, if the next time you encountered a difficult customer your first thought was positive, such as: “great, here’s an opportunity to practice my soft skills.” If you could change your mindset to equate a difficult customer with a skills application opportunity you’d be amazed at how less stressful and enjoyable your job could be.
Soft skills are knowledge and/or techniques that can be used to influence one’s own behaviour or the behaviour of others. When dealing with difficult customers, soft skills provide a variety of options to deescalate tensions and create a positive outcome for customers and client facing personnel.
Soft skills cover a multitude of topics, see fig. 1 below, for a selection. To give you a flavour of the practical application of soft skills this article will focus on: awareness, empathy, mindset and relate them to interactions with difficult customers.
AWARENESS
Your level of awareness of your physical state, emotions and thinking impact on your behaviour and subsequently your interactions with others. Think of these factors as the equivalent to a car dashboard for a human, they can act as a warning system identifying action that needs to be taken by you.
Having a high level of self-awareness is an important starting point for soft skill development. If you go to work and you are feeling physically tired, emotionally volatile and thinking negatively, then there is a high probability that your interactions with others will be negative. If you are in such a state and you encounter a difficult customer a minor matter might escalate to a major issue as you may over react to a customer’s behaviour.
To raise your self-awareness, it is necessary to switch off “auto-pilot” and proactively assess and consider factors that impact upon your physical state, emotions and your thinking. You can engage in this exercise immediately.
Step 1 - Assess your current physical state, emotional state and thinking patterns.
Step 2 - Assess if the aforementioned are positively or negatively impacting on your behaviour.
Step 3 - Identify factors that impact positively and negatively upon yourself and what you need to change, such matters are personal to the individual but a few examples may facilitate your thought process:
Physical self:
negative impact: too much alcohol
positive impact: physical exercise
Emotions
negative impact: excessive worrying
positive impact: socialising
Thinking
negative impact: obsessively thinking about past events you regret
positive impact: thinking about the present time and how you can affect matters that concern you
Consider the opposite of the aforementioned example, you go to work physically full of energy as result of rest, you’re emotionally cheerful as result of socialising and you are thinking in the present as a result of making a proactive choice to do so. You encounter a difficult customer, now you are much more likely to have the ability to deal with the matter so it does not escalate out of proportion.
Self-awareness is not an easy skill to master. The evidence points to superior outcomes from interactions with others by those who are self-aware and take action concerning their physical state, emotions and thinking patterns. However, some people can default to habitual behavioural patterns and not make the effort to be self-aware, they like to snuggle back into their comfort zone and indulge indolence with a dash of negativity, sound familiar?
EMAPTHY
There are two aspects to empathy, cognitive and affective. Cognitive empathy means you have the ability to see things from the point of view of another person, you can “walk in their shoes.” Affective empathy means you can assess another person’s emotional state and respond appropriately. Empathy is a primary soft skill to develop if you want to increase positive interactions with others. Empathy combined with an awareness of other people’s physical state, emotional state and thinking will greatly enhance your ability to understand the behaviour of others.
Consider the following, a customer approaches you, he speaks loudly, his face appears red, his body language is animated, he gestures with his arms as he explains his annoyance at the level of service he has received by your organisation. What is your first reaction? If you are engaging empathy you would assess the information presented, request clarifying information to ascertain if the customer has been wronged and seek to calm the customer and resolve the issue. Even if the customer is disproportionally reacting, you would not take this personally as you would be aware a wide variety of factors are at play, concerning both you and your customer’s, physical state, emotional state and thinking patterns, resulting in the behaviour being displayed.
If you are not engaging empathy, your reaction might be defensive, judgemental and aggressive. You might also raise your voice, become animated, switch off your logical brain and indulge in behaviour that does not solve the issue but adds to the problem.
OPPORTUNITY MINDSET
Turning a negative into a positive is a soft skill of enormous benefit to you. This concept is not about denying reality, it is about reinterpreting events and exercising a high level of skill when interacting with others.
The next time you encounter a difficult customer can you change your mindset from interpreting their behaviour as negative into an opportunity for you to practice your soft skills to achieve a positive outcome. If you can, this almost turns the event into a game, and the better you get at it the more enjoyable your job becomes. To utilize an opportunity mindset your self-awareness needs to be fully engaged, “auto-pilot” needs to be switched off and empathy switched on.
