Dealing with client anger, bad requests and stressful people

Remember the LAER model we spoke about in lesson 14? It genuinely comes in handy when the stress is on.

Take the time to refresh yourself:
Listen to what they have to say
Acknowledge they have a concern (legit or not, that doesn’t matter. We all like to feel validated)
Explore the situation – so ask for extra details, try to get a sense of them, look for underlying issues that may be influencing their behaviour
Respond – not react. Don’t go down the blame route.
Simply stick to the facts, sum up the LAER elements and offer a solution

Even if your client is way off beam (or you are), responding with warmth and grace is the only way to ensure you minimise the problems.

Now, we're digging a little deeper, exercise wise.

Exercise: Practise the LAER way of thinking.

• Think about a particular moment in time when things got a little hot under the collar between you and a client

• Now apply the LAER model to those thoughts

You’ll probably notice that you’ll gain some perspective about the situation through rethinking it. And you’ll probably have one of those moments where what could have been said to calm the situation down crystallises. The whole point behind LAER is to give you those crystal clear moments and to take the emotional reaction out of the business response.

Practise does make perfect, but it’s definitely useful.

Exercise:

• Write down a situation where you find yourself reacting rather than responding when dealing with clients. Some great examples are when they complain, ask for discounts or special treatment, ask you to work for free or want you to give up your free time for their project.

• Write down how you could acknowledge their reason for asking this of you. For a complaint, it may be as simple as a phrase like “I can see why that would frustrate you” or for a discount or free work request it may be “I understand business budgets can be difficult to stretch to what we want at times”.

• Write down some questions you may wish to ask to explore the situation. In a complaint, this may be asking them how they have interacted with your product or understanding their level of exposure to your kind of product. In a free work or discount scenario, it may be searching for the motivation behind the task they want you to perform or investigating what they actually need to achieve.

• Write down a warm, kind yet truthful response based on the information you receive. You can write out different ones for different scenarios, or it could simply be a template of summarising the points above.

• Employ it next time the situation calls for it!

How to disrupt negative thoughts

Sometimes, people will steam us like a bamboo basket of dumplings. Customers are not always right, rational or reasonable. And yet in business, we’re usually the person expected to take the higher ground and make the situation OK again.

That doesn’t mean that even the most professionally acting business owner doesn’t feel anger or like you’ve been stooged on occasion. However, it’s important to let that anger go, preferably before it becomes a volcanic sized eruption on your customer facing Facebook page.

So how do you deal with the negative thoughts and anger bubbling within?

Via a simple process of disruption like this:

1. Allow the thought to happen. You are entitled to feel ripped off on occasion and burying it under a heap of dirt doesn’t help resolve anything.

2. Give yourself a moment to step back. Think about what has happened with objectivity. Don’t invite yourself to dwell on the situation, merely review it.

3. Take a big, deep breath. Breathing is proven to lower our stress levels through our heart rate, deoxygenating the blood, and in turn unclenching our muscles, hands and jaw.

4. Reframe that thought. Think about the mitigating circumstances, cut yourself some slack, give the person the negative thoughts are directed towards some benefit of the doubt, reword the situation, and put the impact back into perspective- whatever you need to do to make a little more sense of the situation.

5. Flip your mood. Laugh about it if it seems absurd. If it’s still making you mad, pick up the gym bag and go sweat it out. Go play with the dog or the kids and see things from their perspective. Put on some happy music. Hang out with a tree or stare at the ocean for 10 minutes. You’ll be surprised how much getting away from the environment and focussing on something like exercise or more positive moments will help.

6. If you find yourself indulging the negative, stop. Yes, it may feel great to tell your story to ten different people and have them as horrified and shocked by your customer’s behaviour as you are, but it doesn’t fix anything. It only makes you dwell on the situation and start hunting for sympathy. Neither is productive. So if you can’t turn it into a funny story on the 2nd re-telling, stop.

7. Resolve to learn a lesson from the situation. Take something back from those trying moments in the form of a lesson. Think about an area of the situation where you may have contributed to the situation or could have handled it better. Or look for a common thread in the situations where these problems arise.

Remember, disrupting your thoughts is a lot like puppy training or toddler taming; you can’t pretend they don’t exist or over-indulge them, but you can implement a consistent framework and gradually see a change in how they respond to you.

A note on the lesson you learn

There’s nothing more embarrassing in business than stumbling across a blog post or social media post where customers are being abused or shamed. Yes, you may be at the end of your rope, but so are many of the people looking at the situation.

Frankly, we’ve got enough to deal with in life without seeing passive aggressive email chains become accusatory blogs. Our work days can do without a cry for social media sympathy.

So if you’re going to express your anger, sadness or frustration, employ critical thinking and style, not criticism and tantrums. If you wouldn’t want your grandma reading it out to her friends at the bridge club, take it to therapy, not your online presence.

Exercise:

• Review a recent situation (professional or personal) and take your lesson from it

• Commit the lesson to your memory

• Look at other places where it could be expressed and become a change on a cultural level.

• Do you need to address it in your terms and conditions? Does it warrant a blog post? Can it become social media tips?

• Write them out

Exercise:

• Write down something you often gloss over or dwell too much on as part of your business life

• Write down the circumstances that may invite this kind of behaviour

• Re-read your answers

• Write down a couple of positive alternatives to the current behaviour

• Choose the best one and make a poster for your wall where you can remind yourself of that change of focus

• Keep practising until it becomes second nature

• Note the change in how you feel from glossing over and dwelling until now

Next, we'll be diving into supercharging your effectiveness. See you soon!