Dealing with Difficult Customers

Dealing with Difficult Customers

The dynamics & role of power, structure and tension in business & personal relationships
Conflict or compromise �How to select the right strategy!
Dealing with anger
Neutralising a hostile situation and environment
Building bridges to positive outcomes
Communicating techniques in difficult situations
Identify the styles of difficult behaviour
Determine your own personal style
A critical management skill to secure for the modern workplace.

Difficult customers and difficult clients typically represent just a fraction of the customers we see each day, but they have a profound impact on people’s performance and motivation.

A difficult customer can be a rude customer, an unreasonable customer, an unhappy customer, a nasty customer or an irate customer. Sometimes it starts with a difficult situation or a customer who is just in a bad mood - but very often we’ve unintentionally created the problems ourselves. Whatever the cause, it requires specialised conflict resolution skills to create positive outcomes.

This program is designed to help frontline staff deal with difficult customers. Building on the themes of customer expectations and how to develop strong relationships with both internal and external customers, the course then focuses on what to do when things go wrong. By understanding your own behaviour in situations involving conflict and frustration, frontline staff will be better able to deal with these workplace challenges and still achieve a positive outcome for all concerned. Participants will gain insights into customer behaviour, retail rage and how to manage complaints effectively.

Learning outcomes

·Demonstrate a range of communication techniques to deal with difficult situations
·Identify styles of behaviour and determine your own personal style
·How to communicate assertively
·Be more aware of the ways difficult people create and use conflict
·Effectively handle conflict with customers
·Find positive solutions to customer complaints

Course content

·What do customers expect from you?
·Building customer relationships
·Meeting the needs of internal customers
·Roadblocks that create conflict with internal customers
·Communicating effectively with customers
·Building rapport with customers
·The nature of conflict
·The effective way of managing conflict
·Your personal behavioural style
·Recognizing customer behaviour
·Assertive communication
·Techniques for handling complaints
·Retail rage

Bad handling of a minor complaint can turn it into a major complaint-possibly with legal implications. Training helps to defuse a difficult situation, obtain the correct information and thus identify the real problem and the action that is required. Being prepared for typical complaints means a quick response, a quick resolution, and a customer who will remember how we helped them.

Benefits for your organisation

Handling complaints can be very difficult; handling complaints from difficult people can be horrendous. This course will prepare you with the skills to manage a complaint, and move to a solution that will meet, or even exceed, the expectations of the customer. This will encourage those customers to become long term customers, and thus benefit your organisation.

Who is this course for?

Front line staff who talk to or correspond with customers during their day-to-day work and who may encounter complaints; they may also encounter difficult and unreasonable people complaining.

Topics Covered:

Understanding the challenging nature of handling complaints
The customer focus; what is the (possibly hidden) agenda of various complaints
How do we make sure that we have correctly and fully understood the complaint?
How do we encourage a full explanation from the customer which describes their problem?
How do we deal with an angry complainant?... and/or a really difficult person?
Now the creative bit: what is the solution that will meet their needs?
Now the logistics bit: are we empowered to do this? if not, who is? can we arrange it?
Tactics to make all this work: being prepared for the typical; responding to the unusual
See every single complaint as an opportunity to improve our service to our customers
By the end of the course, delegates will be able to:

Be able to listen to the complainant; use empathy to gain their help; be able to divine the true requirement- what is it that they really want us to do?
Understand the need to be prepared for typical customer problems and respond to them positively
Know what we need to do to handle the unusual complaint
Be customer focussed; know what it takes to explain-in their terms (and level?)- the solution that will help them
Understand what we can do to improve customer relations and begin to build a new and more positive relationship with each customer with whom we have contact
Thus make positive use of the power of "word of mouth" promotion

Difficult customers and difficult clients typically represent just a fraction of the customers we see each day, but they have a profound impact on people’s performance and motivation.

A difficult customer can be a rude customer, an unreasonable customer, an unhappy customer, a nasty customer or an irate customer. Sometimes it starts with a difficult situation or a customer who is just in a bad mood - but very often we’ve unintentionally created the problems ourselves. Whatever the cause, it requires specialised conflict resolution skills to create positive outcomes.

Topics covered in this course include:

The role of power, structure and tension in relationships

Conflict or compromise - selecting the right strategy

Dealing with anger

Neutralising a hostile environment

Building bridges instead of walls

Communicating techniques in difficult situations


Learning Outcomes At the completion of this course, participants will be able to:

Identify the styles of difficult behaviour and determine your own personal style
Build strategies for creating an atmosphere of positive communication
Identify ways people create and use conflict
Develop tactics that can help manage difficult behaviour
Diagnose underlying factors that cause barriers or breakdown of communication
Respond to difficult situations with professionalism and confidence
Complete an assessment and they will receive the nationally accredited Unit of Competency ICTCC352A �Resolve Complex Customer Complaints.

Duration: 1 Day

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