Train Employees on How to Handle Abusive Customers

Sometimes the customer is not always right. Certain customers – whether they’re unforgiving, obnoxious, or overly needy – can hurt employee morale, put your company’s reputation at risk, and prove too costly to serve. It’s important to clearly define your ideal and non-ideal customer, and then train employees on how to deal with the latter. They are, after all, your company’s frontline eyes and ears – they must decide which customers are worth working with and which are not. Companies often don’t conduct special training to handle entitled and abusive customers, leaving employees to improvise. If employess think “the customer is king” and try endlessly to please every whim, it can hurt your bottom line. Help your employees by explaining what problematic customer behaviors to look out for and establishing a process for how to respond. This will help them make more effective on-the-spot decisions.
.
*Source: Harvard Business Review’s Management Tip of the Day.