Customer Attitudes That Push Our Buttons
© Holly Stiel
The Elements of Choice:
1. NOTICE:
- - Notice that you are having an emotional reaction (Clues=changes in breathing, tension, voice.)
2. NAME IT:
- - Name the initial gut reaction that feels bad.
- - Track how it may change to feelings, of hurt, anger, or resentment.
- - Observe your thoughts that result from the changed feeling. (i.e., hurt to anger)
- - Observe the possible behaviors you might feel the urge to do out of anger, annoyance, dismissal, etc.
3. CHOOSE:
- - After observing the “low road,” the automatic tendency where everyone loses, choose differently.
- - Choose the “high road” response that leads to service and satisfied customers. The place where everyone wins.
When service providers master such a triumph over their initial negative responses, companies’ service levels escalate, and so does the self-esteem of service providers.
If service providers would respond by choosing to provide a quality service experience beyond their own personal preferences, then.... The Entitled would be made to feel important and the center of attention. The Panicked would be helped to feel assured and comfortable. The Imprisoned would experience empathy, The High and Mighty would be showered with compliments, The Bottom Liners would experience clarity, and The Clueless would be handled with patience.
Instead, most service providers would rather BE RIGHT! By responding to their immediate negative emotion, they may get to be right, but being right is the booby prize. (This goes way beyond the old adage of the customer is always right. This is about the human need to be right, which gets in the way of providing good service.)
Usually, being right is played out in subtle ways. For the most part, being right is expressed in an unconscious manner. We don’t even know we are doing it.
A woman in one of my seminars relayed a story about a man that insisted on an apology, when she was obviously very busy and couldn’t help him. In her mind, she believed she’d apologized when she said “I’m sorry, sir, that we are so busy.” Try as I might, I could not get her to see that her response was most definitely not an apology, it was a way to be right! Other methods of being right include blame, complaining to the customer, making the customer feel demeaned, giving more information than is necessary, or out and out arguing.
This is not an easy concept to grasp, as being right feels good, plus, it is extremely difficult to resist the temptation of teaching people how they should behave. Imagine how good it would feel if we could give up our need to be right. It really would have a domino effect.
If we could pay attention to, and be aware of the customer behaviors that push our buttons and propel us to be right, we could think of those buttons as alarm buttons and learn how to avoid pushing them. We can Notice what is happening, Name the emotion that is occurring, and Choose (This can happen in mere seconds.)
Approaching service from this level of awareness increases our possibilities of having a much more interesting and rewarding job.