hello my name is Gary Shotton and I’m here as a part of Inspiring Better Business, IBBTalks.com today we’re going to talk about unhappy customers and this is going to happen I don’t care how hard you try I don’t care how prepared you are there’s going to be some people that come to your business for a product or service and there’s as much as you want it they’re going to be unhappy and how do you deal with them what do you do to turn the situation around we have a saying in America that says when you have a lemon that’s kind of sour and tart how can you make lemonade that’s one that’s a good tasting drink that you could drink and so how do you take an unhappy customer and at least make the best of it remember an unhappy customer will tell at least 10 people and a happy customer might tell one or two so this is bad advertisement and today’s society we have reviews and we have a ways that people can search on the internet and they can the unhappy customer can voice their complaint and it’s there for everyone to hear so you want to watch for this well these are some steps number one be sure and stay calm that is sometimes really hard to do I mean someone is virtually yelling in your face or are calling you unwanted names or you’re there they’re expressing a complete dissatisfaction and you need to to be sure to raise the bar and stay calm don’t raise your voice don’t don’t challenge the person and number two let them talk let them talk all that they will talk let them patiently explain the whole situation don’t interrupt them don’t jump in on them don’t cut them short as long as they want to continue talking and by the way when they continue talking a lot of times they’ll drop in some hints that will give you a little bit of a viewpoint that says you’re not quite so guilty of this and that they are either consistently unhappy with everybody they taste touch or in contact with or that they really have a legitimate complaint here and then along with that let them talk but number three don’t you talk a lot be as quiet as you possibly can that kind of flusters the unhappy customer when they’re ready for a fight you’ve come to to argue with you and you now are very calm but you’re not talking a lot be very selective with your words be very careful with your words don’t imply they’re ignorant or stupidity or their lack of preparation or anything there’s a lot of things you can think but there’s a saying that you all have the right we have a right to have our opinion but we don’t have the right to express it so this is not a time to express your opinion and to this situation and then number four or which we could say get all the facts you know a lot of decisions are made poorly the decisions are made poorly because they’re made based on partial evidence part of the facts part of the information if you have to delay your response saying you know I respect this issue but I don’t have enough information here to know what to do so I need to talk to my driver or I need to talk to someone else’s that was here I wasn’t there to hear what’s happened and do that respectfully don’t don’t call them like a liar that you’re not telling the truth just say I just need to hear all the information before I can make a judgement and then you could do another thing you know just ask some point-blank sir ma’am what would make you happy what what is the end result and they might blurt out something that’s quite reasonable and you say okay I understand that let’s just do that now here’s where you’ve got to know your numbers you can’t give away too much money on a regular basis and and sometimes people complaining or unjustified it’s it’s thing that you got a got what what would it take to make you happy and then try to resolve it could we resolve it with this would this be acceptable to you are we are I’m wanting to go 50/50 on this I understand you’re upset I understand you’re not pleased with it but I really can’t go that far and in resolving this but I can do this but do everything you can to resolve the problem I’ve got to mention here that I’m sitting in my machine shop and we have very very few chances that we would have an unhappy customer because we have long term relationships of course we have parts that are bad we can have problems but our customers I’m really concerned if I have an unhappy customer but my business prior to this was one of moving and storage people and we had some 33,000 jobs some of them were the repeat customers over and over again believe it or not over 17 years we had some customers we dealt with repeatedly but by and large they’re just one new customer after another and people don’t move every week so it wasn’t like a restaurant they’re coming back for coffee every morning and I made a mistake one morning and the coffee was too cold or something these are one shot maybe every five or six years I’d have another chance to move this same person so I had to be very careful about what I did there and so that’s where I’m coming from if you can it’s very wise to followup with writing especially now that I’m on my business now that we might be discussing something over the phone and I think of something recently that happened and we were not in agreement with the way I was an agreement with the way the customer viewed something I’m the one that was objecting to them in essence asking me to pay them pay that be paid I would be paid much less money than original agreed I said that’s really not fair to me and we came to some discussions and you can say negotiations and then it was all over I said I need to just follow up with this in a quick email to you so that we were sure we’re on the same page you know if you have a friend you want to be sure you’re on the same page put it down in writing if you have something to do with them it isn’t you’re calling them or accusing them and wrongdoing is that you cannot remember what happened that day about six weeks later a lot too much happens and if you put it down in a brief summary then you’re able to reap refer to that and say hey I wrote this what it was probably something different than this and so it’s better to solve the problem without ever going to court you can in our land you can go to court and sue someone but just count the time and the energy and the lack of energy that you have for something else and and and be careful that you don’t get it that far if at all possibly you’re better off just writing it off in most cases forgetting about it and letting if you’re you feel wronged let let the circumstances or God deal with it without you in the picture now there are times when you have a person that’s just so distraught over something that you might ask that is there something deeper bothering you and they might break down in tears and they might they might expose that they have something so much pressure on their their life that they’re actually not acting in their normal human capacity because of the pressure there’s a chance to reach out to them don’t try to see them as an enemy and maybe last but not least is don’t hold any anger towards a person if if you’ve been wronged and you you know there’s an unhappy customer there but now that’s made you unhappy over the situation you’ve got to be able to wash your hands and go on to the next job go on to the next challenge because you cannot harbor something that’s burning you up I had somebody in bezel with from me a key employee my second man person in command here about 20 years ago and it took me about six weeks there was enough money that it really hurt me and they wrote checks to themselves and cashed them and totally illegal but wasn’t worth pursuing there it moved out of state and it just wasn’t going to be something I could legally and wanted to legally pursue and I’ll be honest it took about six weeks for me finally to get over it in the sense that man I’m not gonna let this eat on me out wake up in the middle of night so mad still upset at them and I said no I’m not gonna let this dig me into the hole and and you know sometimes we just gotta what we call eat crow I joke about it but we’ve just got a bite or lip and just basically say you know I’m gonna get through this I’m gonna hold my tongue I’m gonna think the best in this situation I’m going to go off to the next one now remember you don’t have to forget this totally because you could put a note in the file never ever deal with this person again and just keep it in your file keep it in your memory but you’re not mad at them you just know that you’re not going to deal with them again well I hope these things help about an unhappy customer whether what society are in or what language won’t make a difference you’re gonna have some customers that are not gonna be happy and you got to learn how to deal with it thanks for being a part of Inspiring Better Business.