James Schramko here, and I’m not sure if you’ve ever been in a hostile conversation with a customer, but I
imagine it can be a little bit intense. And there is some training out there about this and some of the training is dead wrong.
I spend a lot of time early on in my career in debt collection. In fact, my first full-time office job after I completed some of my studies was as a trainee debt collector, and my job was to phone up people and ask them to make payments. And sometimes, these people were very angry and cross.
Now, some of the training that you see out there, it says address the customer in a calm and paced manner, try and calm them down, and etc. That doesn’t really work. What I found to be helpful was to meet my customer where they’re at. If they were aggressive and angry and speaking loudly and speaking faster then I would also match them. This is called pacing.
There are other ways of describing this. It could be called pairing, but the point is meet them where they’re at. It’s like the old internet connection, you know, when it used to dial in and it’s like psh, psh, psh, psh, waaaw, p-kuhhhhh! And it’s making that connection, getting that handshake. That’s what you want to do is meet them where they’re at and then bring them back.
So, I also found the same in selling and also in very heavy negotiations and sometimes mediations. Any kind of customer complaint, when people are going off, when they’re really wound up, meet them at their energy level and they will probably respond to you better because you’re on the same wavelength and then bring them back. A bit of practice with this, you’ll probably find you’ll get much better at dealing with difficult situations.
And I’ll give you one other tip, a bonus tip if you like that I learned from debt collection and that is, don’t be afraid of the phone. There’s no reason to be concerned or worried when you’re speaking to people if you’re dialing for dollars and that is simply because the customer cannot punch you in the face over the phone. Okay? You could always hang up if you have to. No harm done. So, it’s not physically threatening.
Although, it was a different story when I was out there repossessing cars and dragging people’s cars down their driveway but that’s probably a story for another time. If you’d like to hear that story, why don’t you comment near this video and I’ll tell you some of my repossession tips because dealing with conflicts face-to-face requires some extra tips. So, make a comment below, I’ll keep an eye out where this video is and you might get some more from me.
I’m James Schramko and this is SuperFastBusiness.com. I help online business owners grow their business,
manage their teams better and make more sales, get better business models and work a little bit less but make plenty of money as well.
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