Page 66 - 100 Great Marketing Ideas (100 Great Ideas)

29 LET THEM SHOUT!

Irate customers can be hard to deal with. They feel let down when
their product (or more often, service) goes wrong, and they want to
hit back. Of course, yelling at the only person who can help them
is not good policy, but it’s difficult for most people not to do this,
and it’s even harder for the company employee or manager to take
things calmly when confronted with an irate customer.

All too often, a customer complaint ends up degenerating into a
shouting match between the customer and the manager—even if
an employee is empowered to disconnect from the customer (for
example, by hanging up the telephone or calling Security), this does
not solve the problem.

Ultimately, people solve problems for themselves. If the problem
cannot be resolved by talking to the person who supplied them, the
customer will go to someone who can solve the problem—usually
a competitor. Not only does this lose you the customer, it also
generates a large amount of negative word of mouth.

The idea

The Cellular One cellphone company has 40 “save” reps in its San
Francisco call center. These people have the job of saving defecting
customers wherever possible: each “save” rep takes about 50 calls a
day from disaffected customers, many of which are abusive.

The first step in the save process is to allow the customer to vent
their anger. The reps are trained to ignore abuse, and to understand
that the customer is angry about the situation they find themselves

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