Deal With Aggressive Customers

Aggressive customers can be a nightmare. Don't confuse them with assertive customers who simply insist on their rights; this article is about the customers who issue threats, shout, ruin the experience for other customers, and make unreasonable demands. They may even grow physically aggressive by putting their hands on employees or causing damage to property. If you work in the service sector, it's smart to educate yourself on how to deal with aggressive customers.

Steps

Defusing the Situation

1. Stay calm. The worst thing you can do in this situation is to raise your energy level to theirs, at it might turn a combustible situation into an all-out explosion. However, because you, as an employee, cannot simply walk away from the situation, you must stay engaged with the customer without letting your own temper get out of hand.
   • The most obvious thing to avoid is raising your voice.
   • Don’t be sarcastic with the customer.
   • Do your best to maintain a soothing voice and mask any frustration you might feel.
2. Control your own body language. It’s easy to read the nonverbal cues of aggression and anger in other people’s bodies, but be aware of the messages your own body is sending to the customer. It’s not enough to simply keep your voice down — you must soothe the customer’s mood with all the communicative devices in your toolbox. Some nonverbal cues to control and avoid include:
   • Pacing
   • Drumming your fingers or tapping your feet
   • Clenching your fists
   • Clenching your jaw
   • Rolling your eyes
   • Furrowing your eyebrows
   • Staring the customer down
   • Crossing your arms or putting your hands on your hips
3. Don’t enter the customer’s physical space. Even when everyone’s calm, violating someone’s personal space can be interpreted as a show of aggression or lack of care for someone’s level of comfort. When people get angry, they need a larger area of personal space, so give aggressive customers wide berth. Otherwise, they may think you’re trying to show aggression of your own, or that you’re not taking the situation seriously by failing to recognize how agitated they’ve grown.
   • For your own personal safety, try to stand behind a counter, table, or other barrier to reinforce the physical distance between you and the customer.
4. Listen to the customer’s grievance. Understand that no matter how unreasonable the customer is being in terms of the scale of their anger, there may very well be a kernel of truth to what they’re saying. By letting the customer air their grievance, you’re letting them vent off some of their frustration and hopefully stopping the situation from getting worse. Furthermore, you’re showing them that you, as an employee, care about the customer’s experience, gaining you good will.
   • Don’t ever interrupt the customer, even if you want to respond to something they’ve said.
   • Even if they’re being unreasonable, allow them to talk themselves out.
   • Use positive nonverbal communication cues to demonstrate that you’re actively listening and engaging with the customer. Examples include maintaining eye contact (but not staring), nodding along, and demonstrating concern on the customer’s behalf at the appropriate moments with facial expressions.
5. Ask questions to better understand the problem. In order to calm a customer down, you need to understand why they’re upset in the first place. If the customer is so worked up that they’re ranting instead of providing you with useful information that you could use to assess and resolve the situation, wait until there’s a gap in the conversation to ask guided questions that will help you understand what’s going on. Again, don’t cut the customer off — wait for an opportunity for you to speak. Some questions you might ask include:
   • "Is this the first time you've had this issue at our business? Can you tell me more about your previous frustrations, so I know specifically how to instruct our staff how to improve customer experience?"
   • "Tell me exactly what happened today, from the beginning. What was the exact employee behavior that triggered your bad experience?"
   • "Was there a single action that ruined your experience with us, or are you frustrated by the buildup of several small problems? Is there one large thing we need to change, or several small adjustments?"
   • "Which employee or employees are you upset with right now? Is there one person in particular, or does our whole staff need to be addressed about their attitudes and performance?"
   • If another employee is involved, use your discretion to determine whether or not it would calm the customer down to involve that employee in the conversation.
6. Try to find a solution to the problem. Ask the customer what you could do to make them feel better about the situation. If what they ask is reasonable and within your power, give them what they ask for. However, aggressive customers are sometimes irrational in their demands, or ask you to do something you are not authorized to do.
   • Try to strike a compromise. Explain to the customer that you would give them what they want if you were authorized to do so, but that you would be punished yourself if you did that. Instead, offer them whatever you’re authorized to give.
   • Call a manager. If the customer would like something that you’re not authorized to provide, call a manager or supervisor to see if it can be authorized.

Ejecting a Customer

1. Lay out the repercussions for their behavior. If you feel like a situation is getting out of control and either threatening your personal safety or the positive experience of your other customers, tell the angry customer that you will ask them to leave if they don’t control their frustration. Everyone loses their temper from time to time, so give them a chance to get a handle on it. Remain respectful and calm; don’t raise your voice or point your finger at them. Simply tell them what the next steps will be if their behavior doesn’t change. Some things you might say include:
   • "I understand that you're frustrated, but we both need to be calm to resolve this situation."
   • "Your frustration at your bad experience is now making the experience worse for the rest of our customers. We'd like to work with you to fix the situation, but don't you agree that the rest of the people here have a right to a pleasant experience too?"
2. Explain why you’re asking them to leave. Customers often take the slogan “the customer is always right” to heart, not realizing that the customer can very often be wrong. Explain to the customer that their abusive behavior is personally threatening, and that they are ruining the experience for all of their other customers, who have just as much right to good service as they do.
   • "While you have a right to voice your concerns, you do not have a right to be abusive towards our staff."
   • "I am happy to work with you to resolve this situation, but your behavior is making me feel uncomfortable."
   • "As an employee, it's my job to protect my colleagues and patrons, so I have to ask you to leave the building."
   • "If you don't remove yourself from this situation voluntarily, I'll have to call the police to protect my staff and customers."
3. Escort the customer out of the establishment. To reinforce your verbal ejection of the customer, move toward the exit yourself and ask the customer to follow you. Even if the customer does not initially respond to the ejection, lead the way. Do this even if the customer does not take your lead and move toward the exit at first; when they see that the object of their anger is moving away, they will likely follow you toward the exit.
   • The objective is to remove the customer from the premises in order to protect both the safety and the experience of the people in your business.
   • Often, when the customer finds themselves removed from the business, they will move on even if they are still upset.
   • Allow them to move away from the business on their own before you return to work. If they see you immediately go back inside, they might follow you back in.
4. Don’t put your hands on the customer. Unless you feel that the customer has grown physically threatening to you, other employees, other customers, or themselves, avoid touching the customer. Touching someone who is overly agitated could cause them to react very poorly, and potentially violently.
   • However, if the customer becomes physically aggressive either to you, someone else, or to themselves, you are within your rights to try to prevent injury by subduing them.
5. Call security or the police if necessary. If you don’t feel safe around the customer or if the situation is disrupting your business and doesn’t have an end in sight, call the police or a security service if your business pays for one. Try to limit the customer’s impact by getting them outside of your business. Don’t try to physically detain the customer, as you don’t have any legal right to do so unless they physically attack someone.
   • If the customer puts their hands on someone or breaks property, do your best to get them out of your establishment. If they won't leave, move employees and customers away from the aggressive customer to protect them from physical harm.
   • Stay calm and respectful, but do not try to engage the customer any further. You’ve done everything you can to resolve the situation, and you should just disengage and wait for the authorities.
   • Keep the phone numbers for security easily accessible for the entire staff instead of keeping them in the back office. When customers get out of hand, employees almost always call the onsite manager to deal with the situation. If the situation truly gets out of hand, there’s a good chance the manager is already busy with it, so all employees need to know how to reach out for help.
   • Post the phone numbers somewhere out of the way of customer traffic, but regularly visited by employees — behind a cash register, or in an employee break room, for example.
   • Make sure the number is clearly legible. If you have bad handwriting, print the number out using a computer.
6. Use discretion when asking a drunk customer to leave. If you work in a restaurant or bar that served enough alcohol to a customer to get them to that state, you may be held responsible for that person’s actions once they leave your establishment.
   • If the customer seems drunk, offer to call them a cab while they wait outside.
   • If they are with a group, ask a sober friend to drive them home.
   • If they insist on driving themselves, write down a description of the car including the tag number, and call the police immediately with that information.

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Sources and Citations

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