Page 53 - Kindness - No Forward

Change Minds by Actions—Not Words

Arguing will not change anyone’s mind or solve their problems. Explaining
or rationalizing will not help, either. And the fact that the statement the
person is making may not be true is not important. What is important is
that the speaker thinks their problem is valid. And should be solved.

When you say you understand how someone feels, you are agreeing with
the feelings of the person, not the facts.

So don’t waste time defending your actions, company policy, or the
condition of the world. Solve the problem at hand.

That’s when the mind of the other person gets changed…not as a result of
your debating how they should or shouldn’t feel.

You can explain and explain, and most of the time they will finally concur
with you just to move on to other things! But you haven’t changed their
mind about how they feel, and you haven’t solved their problem. So you
shouldn’t be surprised when you later discover they still have the same
opinion. Only by then, it’s probably gotten worse!

A few years ago, I was asked by another consultant to help with a problem.

The client was a large mortgage company. Twice a year they sent out
statements to hundreds of thousands of customers. Obviously, this
resulted in thousands of telephone calls with questions, complaints about
escrow amounts, you name it. To handle the volume of calls, the mortgage
company hired dozens of temporaries to help answer customer questions.

The consultant had done a thorough job of estimating the length of time
these calls would take so the mortgage company would have enough
telephone lines to handle the calls without inconveniencing the customers.

But when the calls began to come in, the length of the average call was
much longer than expected.

He asked me to help and we discovered the customer service people were
explaining everything every time a customer had a problem.

“We’re all temps”, “We have an abundance of calls”, “We only send these
twice a year”, and on and on. These detailed explanations were causing
the calls to be longer than planned, which caused longer delays than
planned, which caused more customer complaints to explain. A real
problem!