The Best Way to Deal With Disgruntled Customers
Keep ’em gruntled!
I don’t know if gruntled is a real word. My spell check says it isn’t.
But you get the idea.
Once you dis-gruntle someone (and if they’re not gruntled, assume it’s your fault until proven otherwise), it’s very hard to re-gruntle them.
Not saying it can’t be done, just that by that point, you’re fighting a losing battle.
But let’s say you’re at that point. You’re dealing with a customer who most certainly is NOT gruntled. What do you do?
You need to find out WHY he is so disgruntled. And remember what I said above…
Assume it’s your fault.
I shouldn’t have to tell you this part, but try to treat the person respectfully, make things right, blah blah blah…
The conventional customer service industry spends weeks in meetings with PowerPoint sides discussing the best way to “manage” and “handle” what I just told you in one damn sentence.
Common sense. Customer service requires providing good service to customers, treating them like a human.
I’ll let you figure that part out on your own.
The part of the dis-gruntling that is more interesting to me is what you do about it on the macro. How you fix things moving forward.
Remember, assume it’s your fault. How did you company’s actions, lack of actions, sales practices, or information provided cause this?
Really come up with some answers to that question.
Then fix them.
Let me tell you a secret about customers…
Most of them aren’t insane, irrational assholes who live to make your life miserable. Instead, they’re regular people who decided that your product or service would provide them acceptable value for the price you charge.
They like what you do, and they paid you to do it. That’s the baseline, the default. Where start off.
Your job is to keep them in this happily gruntled state. Hint: They’ll BUY MORE from you if you do this right.
If the customer was “disgruntled” because the product wasn’t what he expected, you need to figure out WHY he expected it to be something it wasn’t.
Don’t ask him. Especially if he isn’t sufficiently gruntled. He probably wouldn’t be able to tell you even if he wanted to.
Instead, look at your entire sales and marketing process. Something there, or some previously existing assumption in society, caused him to expect something different.
It’s important to provide good information about what your product is, but it’s equally important to talk about what it ISN’T.
Similarly, you want to make it clear who your product is for, but also, make it clear who it is NOT for.
An example.
I do consulting in the customer service space for entrepreneurs, startups, and small to medium businesses. As you can probably guess from reading this, my methods are not exactly the “conventional” corporate BS you might ignore on a PowerPoint presentation in a stuffy windowless conference room somewhere.
Not for these people!
My services aren’t for those people. And that’s OK. If you need a PHD scientist to create advanced mathematical models of the results of your customer survey that most people ignore, I’m not your guy.
If you think that middle-managers middle-managing middle-managers is an effective way to do business, go elsewhere.
My services are for people who want their businesses, including their customer service team, to be profitable, efficient, and require very little management time and stress.
Bottom line, here’s how to handle disgruntled customers:
- Respectfully deal with the individual issue.
- Assume it’s your fault
- Identify the root cause of WHY this person was no longer gruntled.
- Fix it.
Remember, the best customer service interaction is the one that never happens.
Because there never was a problem.
The best customer is often the one you never hear from. The one who just buys from you over and over again.
And the best way to deal with disgruntled customers is to keep them gruntled in the first place.
If you need some help with that, you’ve come to the right place.
