Prospects Have Issues: Handling Conflict

Here we are exploring the kinds of pains your customer care people are experiencing.

One of the first pains we typically uncover is your frontline staff’s inability to handle any kind of conflict.  Think of the issues that can stem from this:

• An avoidance of delivering bad news to a customer; things like price increases, late deliveries, out of stock positions?
• Or maybe they have a passive/aggressive way of handling issues (saying no problem, then ignoring it)
• Damaging of an employees’ self-esteem by an aggressive customer
• An escalation of a situation that should have been easily fixed the first time
• Having to involve supervisors or management time in intervening
• Good employees experiencing burnout, leaving and having to be replaced; constantly having to train and socialise new people to the job at great expense; the cost of turnover in customer care is appalling and employers are surprised to learn that it can be controlled.

Owners and managers don’t understand why this happens.  They would handle these situations without a problem.  Think about who gets hired for a frontline position: in DISC terms (personality analysis) these are step-by-step people who don’t often speak up; they’re helpful to a fault; and are reluctant to lay down boundaries, even in their own defence.  They are loyal and don’t want to offend. They yearn to be liked and please people.   In other words, they need a process for handling people who, to them, appear out of control. They also need a different way of viewing ‘difficult people’ and ‘conflict’.

Some of the exploratory questions you might ask a prospect to see if they’ve experienced these situations might be:

Do you find your frontline people are often passing difficult customers along to their supervisors?  Perhaps on simple things that you think they should be able to handle themselves?

Are you finding that sometimes conflict happens between departments but is never properly resolved and therefore repeats itself again and again?

Have you ever had a very good employee completely burnout and leave the company simply because they couldn’t handle some of the more challenging customers or situations?

Do you think some of your newer employees are taking negativity very personally and it’s affecting their productivity at work?

When you begin to explore conflict in the workplace, you are likely to find communication problems, comfort zone issues, a lack of understanding or inability to read people.  All of these roadblocks can be addressed by Sandler’s Strategic Customer Care program.  Sessions like Comfort Zone, DISC, Transactional Analysis, Questioning Techniques and of course, Dealing with Difficult People all combine to address these issues.