Hi @stefenpaul. Welcome to the Refresh Community. I’m sorry to hear what you’re going through at work. It must be very difficult to witness and engage with people who are disrespectful, angry, rude most of the times. You’re in the right place. I’m sure our members here can share with you learnings and methods of dealings with difficult customers from their own experiences.

Here are some things you may find helpful (You may be doing most of these already):

• Listen to your customers and understand their needs
• Be patient and stay calm
• Instead of turning down their requests with a NO, see if you can provide them with alternative solutions
• Do not take their actions and words personally
• Empathize with them
• Get help from the right people whenever required (it can be your co-worker, mentor, manager, etc.)
• Know their history of interactions before getting into a meeting with them
• Lower your voice
• Be transparent to them about what can and cannot be done
• If you are still finding it challenging to deal with them, reach out to other people who are finding it relatively easy or better to deal with such customers. Learn from them and get their help.
• Thank them for being open with you about their concerns/ problems/ feedback

We had a Coffee Chat Session focussing on Customer Communication and we had a lot of our members share their thought around it. You can give it a read and I’m sure it’ll be a lot useful.

And we do have our very own Freshworks Academy where you can find a course on Customer Service Skills. Do check it out :)

While I do know these are easier said than done, try to find small ways to navigate through this. See which works best for you as something that works for one may not necessarily work for others. If you do find any of these useful or find any other new ways that are helping you deal customers better at work, do share them here with us!

@stefenpaul I’m sure I’ve seen something on this. I’ll see if I can find what I saw (no guarantee that I will be able to though)

This chat was led by CS expert @Micah Solomon and I bet he has some proven guidance that will help here. Although from the little you’ve shared I can’t help feel that this isn’t simply a CS-related issue but perhaps also related to wider company culture.

I’ve had a look and realised that what I’d seen was related to the other side of the fence - where suppliers deliberately ignore customer issues and complaints. So I asked industry expert Roy Atkinson for anything he recommends for dealing with nasty customers and he provided two reads. The first by Roy is a unique perspective and the second by Shep Hyken is similar to what has already been provided:

http://www.thethinkzone.com/2010/06/customer-service-weighing-options.html

https://hyken.com/customer-service-strategies/six-ways-to-handle-angry-customers/

Returning to my earlier point though, here in the UK customer-facing staff are often protected from customer abuse through policies and practices that warn customers that their abuse of staff will not be tolerated. For example, a telephone-based CS agent can state - perhaps after following all the shared advice above - that company policy protects staff from abuse and they will be ending the call, in line with company policy, if such abuse continues.