Managing Difficult Customers (Essay Sample)

Handling difficult customers is inevitable. Therefore, improving the organization team’s capacity to defuse tense situations and resolve customer conflicts effectively is an integral aspect of excellent customer service. Businesses must ensure that workers have relevant skills to handle customer issues. Customers are usually considered the primary stakeholders of the business. So, one must ensure that they access optimal services from the organization. However, the first step to developing a training program is acquiring the input of managers on the organizational and instruction needs. Four managers took part in an online interview where several questions about the proposed training topic were posed. This reported assessment will contain the collated findings of the questionnaire used to identify the training needs when teaching employees how to deal with difficult customers. The training needs analysis got eight responses to the survey, where the respondents’ answers were intended to guide the design of the training program.
1 Why is the topic of dealing with difficult customers important to your organization?
Q1. Collated answers: All four respondents recognized the importance of learning to handle difficult customers not only to de-escalate tense situations but also to ensure the safety of the organization’s employees and, more importantly, to guarantee the highest level of customer service. These responses were consistent with current literature on organizational training needs concerning defusing tense situations with difficult customers. For instance, Hartline and Ferrell (1996) argued that customer focus training programs provide the tools and support staff required to identify and handle difficult customers through effective conflict resolution capabilities. Although aggressive customers present singular customer service problems, training employees to respond to these scenarios is the most effective way of ensuring top-tier satisfaction levels.
2 What are the learning goals of this training program?
Q2. Collated answers: Consistent with previous replies on the importance of the training program, the respondents stated that the learning goals of the same should include learning how to verbally and physically de-escalate a tense situation, building employees’ confidence in dealing with customer conflicts, developing staff’s skills and awareness of the customer service issue, increasing the ability of staff to respond to difficult customers with the highest degree of customer service, along with improving employees’ proficiency in reading customer body language. Huang et al. (2018) agree with most of these suggested goals concerning ensuring organizational growth and sustainability. The authors determined that effectively dealing with angry or confrontational customers is critical in de-escalating tense situations and turning angry customers into loyal ones. Disgruntled customers who receive an appropriate emotional response from customer care staff are more willing to return or recommend the brand to others.
3 What internal and external obstacles might affect your training programs?
Q3. Collated answers: The respondents gave relatively wide-ranging answers, with every manager citing different internal and external obstacles to program implementation. For instance, some of the internal obstacles revealed in the survey included poor confidence among staff, fear of conflict, lack of willingness to learn, and poor staff engagement. On the other hand, the external obstacles to the training program included the inability to access instruction sessions, insufficient time to conduct the training, and ignorance of other non-organizational actors in the industry on the training topic. Existing literature concurs with suggested internal and external barriers to customer service training. For instance, Johnson, Park, and Bartlett (2018) argue that internal barriers to employee training are largely tied to attitudinal and behavioral factors, while external barriers mostly relate to organizational factors. One of the most significant internal impediments to customer service training is engagement, a strong predictor of training efficacy. On the other hand, insufficient organizational planning and resource allocation are significant external barriers to training programs.