Just try to tolerate the intolerable ones
By Rich Lindblom, Contributor
Let’s face it, sometimes customers can be a bit of a challenge, and sometimes far worse. Over time it can wear down even the most positive employees on your staff.
In my experience as an appliance dealer, it seemed to hit our delivery personnel the hardest. I’m not certain why, but it always seemed like those guys got frustrated with customers faster than anyone else on my staff.
Maybe my delivery people were all just prima donnas; that isn’t out of the realm of possibility. And then again, maybe it was because customers who had just spent a lot of money purchasing a new appliance believed they had the right to be extra demanding, and sometimes even demeaning, to the people who delivered it.
But here’s the thing: My answer was always the same for whoever complained about an ill-tempered customer. All I told them was “You don’t have to love your customers.” It really is that simple. You don’t have to love them; heck, you don’t even have to like them. But what you must do is treat them with respect.
The average interaction between a customer and any of your employees is typically somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes. So no matter how nasty that customer may be, for that short period of time all you need to do is bite your tongue and pretend you like them. Smile once in a while, laugh at their unpleasant joke or comment and make some small talk. Just do whatever it takes to get through the interaction in a positive manner, no matter how challenging that customer may be.
More than once I sat down with a delivery tech and spelled it out in dollars and sense. “Look Joe,” I would say. “The customer pays your salary when they buy a new washer that you deliver and install for them. Including driving time, you’ve got maybe an hour’s pay involved. You make $20 an hour, so this customer who you don’t like is basically handing you a twenty dollar bill for your time. And all you have to do to earn it is play nice for 30 minutes. You don’t have to like them; you just have to respect them. Once you get back in the truck and drive down the street you can say whatever you want about them. Is that really all that hard?”
Now don’t get me wrong — it’s never OK for a customer to be downright abusive or worse. And sometimes you do have to draw the line and respectfully tell that customer to find another store. But those situations are few and far between. So for the other 99% of challenging customers, all you need do is be the adult in the room. Be the bigger person and don’t let the customer get under your skin. And when it’s all said and done, you can smile all the way to the bank because they just paid part of your salary.
In actuality, the overwhelming majority of your customers are nice people. And if you ask me, they are the ones that make what we do every day both enjoyable and rewarding. They are the ones who you should remember when you go home at the end of the day, not the difficult ones.
So the next time you get that difficult customer, put on your happy face and remember that when you go out for that pizza and a beer next Saturday night, they’re the ones who will be paying for it.
Rich Lindblom is a past principal of Advanced Maytag Home Appliance in Schaumburg, Ill., and now shares his 40-plus years of retail experience with BrandSource members as product manager for AVB’s SYNC point-of-sale system and as a columnist for YSN. You can reach Rich at rich.lindblom@avb.net.
