by Scott Brennan

Created on: May 05, 2009   Last Updated: June 22, 2009

Transforming a customer from unruly to happy can feel like a seemingly impossible task. How many times have you serviced an unhappy customer, accommodated all of their requests, provided sincere apologies for their inconvenience, and found the customer's demeanor towards your company was unchanged?

Retaining customers is critical towards the success of any company, but how can this be accomplished when today's customers have such lofty expectations and seem unresponsive to traditional, accommodating customer service?

The answer is simpler than you think. Most customer service professionals tend to categorize customers into one of two categories: happy or unhappy. Controlling customers' emotions is a daunting task, and it provides little value to an organization. Happy customers leave companies when better offers come along. Satisfied customers stay with a company for life.

By focusing your efforts on satisfying unruly' customers, a potentially negative experience for your company has just become a rare opportunity to build customer loyalty.

What additional actions does a company need to take move customers from dissatisfied to satisfied? Four simple steps at the beginning of your interaction: Acknowledge the customers specific issue, justify the customer's frustration concerning the issue, apologize for the specific actions which created the issue, and thoroughly explain what actions you would like to take to rectify the matter.

You may be thinking this sounds very similar to what you have done in the past. Simply stated, it is; however, there are also very key differences. In most cases, we've all heard responses like, "Mr. Customer, I understand your frustration and I'm very sorry about your problem, but I will be glad to assist you with that today."

At no point during this statement did the customer ever hear that we truly understood why they were upset. Not only was the customer's issue and frustration blanketed with words like problem' and your frustration,' but they were also seemingly dismissed with the transitional word but.' Listed below are the benefits to using the four simple steps listed above at the beginning of your interaction with an unruly customer.

Acknowledge the customer's specific issue

By verbalizing the customer's issue, the customer knows you understand how they were inconvenienced.

Justify the customer's frustration concerning the issue

By letting the customer know they have the right to be frustrated, the customer will no longer need to

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