Dealing with Difficult Customers: How to Turn Demanding, Dissatisfied, and Disagreeable Clients Into Your Best Customers

by Noah Fleming, Shawn Veltman, Debra Margles (Foreword)

Ignore a valid complaint and you could be the next viral sensation for all the wrong reasons. But give in to every demand and you may be consumed with the often petty complaints of your worst customers and wind up pandering to them with freebies, discounts, and special attention. That will cost you time and money, and perhaps worse, do little or nothing to solve the root problem.

Dealing with Difficult Customers will show

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

241 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 20, 2017

About the author

NOAH FLEMING is a strategic marketing expert and CEO of Fleming Consulting & Co. He has provided coaching and consulting services for thousands of business owners, executives, and individuals, and is an expert blogger for FastCompany and guest blogger for The Globe and Mail’s “Report on Business.”

Reviews

[Paula · Rating 2 out of 5]

I knew this book was written for commercial businesses, but I thought I might get a few practical tips for dealing with difficult customers anyway. Sadly, this was not the case. The main premise here seems to be that many customer complaints come because customer expectations do not meet customer experiences, therefore a company must be very clear about setting up expectations and then matching their service to meet that. But I work in a library, and customer expectations are all over the place, from just wanting to come in to find a book to expecting staff members to submissively kowtow to their every demand, no matter how unreasonable. After all, they "pay my salary". As a taxpayer, however, I also pay money towards my own salary so this remark doesn't cut much ice with me.
The other thing the authors wanted to make very clear is that a company can, and should, "fire" their really difficult customers, the ones who are never satisfied. Just cut them loose, as they are more trouble than they are worth. This idea sounds heavenly. Would that we could do just that in my library. But we are funded by tax dollars - mine and everybody else's - so we have to put up with the mean, the rude, the demanding, the unbalanced, the negligent (parents) as best we can, and try to deal with their sometimes unreasonable demands on a daily basis.

[Eleni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Το βιβλιαράκι είναι μια διαφήμιση για τα σεμινάρια των συγγραφέων στη διαχείριση του πελάτη.
Σίγουρα αμερικανιά, αλλά πολλές εταιρείες και υπάλληλοι χρειάζονται μια καθοδήγηση, ιδιαίτερα τώρα που μας... ψεκάζουν.
2 αστεράκια γιατί μόνο το βιβλίο δε φτάνει.

[Jacob O'connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly good. "Difficult Customers" has some great insight into some of the mindset problems that plague customer service. The practical parts aren’t on par, but overall a very good read.


Notes:

Nook

You need to demonstrate to anybody who walks in that you have their best interest at heart, and that you’ll do everything you can to truly understand what they want, what they need, and how they can get it in the easiest, most enjoyable way possible. (9)

Chapter 1 Defining the Difficult Customer (14)

Robbers Cave experiment proved that it's easy to get people to dislike each other. Much harder to turn that around (16)

It is Not enough that I succeed -- others must fail (16)

Anytime we see somebody we consider to be a part of our out-group hurt, our brain's first reaction is to celebrate. Similarly, when we see anybody in our in-group hurt, our brain's first reaction is to commiserate with them and feel pain (18)

John Kenneth Galbraith, "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof" (18)

Expectations gap (24)

Hierarchy of horrors: what are the things my company does that create unpleasant feelings for its customers (27) Personal note: another way to look at this, what are our failures that most frustrate our customers

Have you created an expectations gap by overpromising? (30)

customer loyally is never owed (31)

All who open their wallet should get the same service (31)

Being consistently good is better than being great once in a while (31)

Chapter 2: Managing Expectations: What they Want vs. What you Deliver (32)

Could it be the reason we can't please our customers is that we don't understand them? (43)

Chapter 3: Buying vs. Selling: Creating Greater alignment

The death of the trusted advisor

The sales person's job is not to sell, but to help the customer to buy (46)

This distinction is the difference between company who struggle to deal with difficult customers and those who get hand-written Thank you notes for their client base (46)

Four stages of readiness to buy
1. "Shut up and take my money"
2. I saw your advance but I'm not interested
3. I have a problem that I'll pay you to fix, but I have no idea your product exists (50)
1. only once the problem has been adequately defined will the prospect even be willing to hear about solutions to it.
4. Who would ever buy that and why? (51)

Covey: A trusting relationship is built on four foundatons
1. Intergrity
2. Intent
3. Capabilities
4. Results

Chapter 4: understand Problem Children and Hungy Hippos: They May be Loyal, but are they Wroth It? (58)

The pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule (61)

Lets be very clear here: we're not suggesting that you fire your customers based on how much revenue they bring you, but rather how many problems they're creating that aren’t your fault (61)

The problem child = the customer who is insatiable and can never be pleased

It's usually pretty easy to identify the problem children in most businesses. they're almost always the lowest value, most price-sensitive customers you have (61)

If 30% of your complaints are about price then you're doing a bad job in attracting the right customers with your marketing answer pre-selling processes, or you're doing a bad job with their buying experiences, which leads them to assume they shouldn't be paying a premium (66)

Here are three simple tips for helping you address any customer's first complaint
1. Treat every customer's first complaint as if it was served to you on a silver platter (68)
2. Determine if this is a new issue or if somebody else has commented about it
1. if it's new, ask yourself and your team if theres anything you can do to correct it
2. if it's not new, re-examine why it hasn't been corrected yet
3. Have somebody on your team follow up with them personally (69)

Renegotiating the terms of the relationship
1. identify a behavior or set of behaviors that is causing friction /with you and the customer
2. Identify what would have to change in order to make you want to continue serving that customer
3. Communicate the required changes to the customer, and enforce the terms of the new relationship (69)

Chapter 5: The Three Disciplines of excellent customer service Organizations (72)

Give scripts to my team (78)

Chapter 8: How to be Your Own Worst Customer (108)

The undercover boss syndrome

"Make me feel special" (110)

Book-breaking bug that made the rest of the book unreadable

Do everything in your power to make the current customer feel special (127)

[Ana-Maria Bujor · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who has a job dealing with customers, I find this book very useful, practical and no-nonsense. I like the authors' perspective on employee training, on finding best practices and implementing them, on never thinking you are too good for a task and most of all I really like the parts about the expectation gap. The expectation gap is probably the main reason customers and the companies dealing with them don't get along so well.
Looking back on my experience, it seems I did some things right by intuition or simply because I wasn't sure what to do and just acted in a way in which I kind of forgot that person was a customer. Instead, I thought of him/her as a person with a problem I can help with. And apparently just thinking of customers as people is a long way to go (who knew?)
All in all, a lot of great stuff in this book, now it's only a matter of implementation.
PS: even when I screwed up, my customers were very nice and patient, so I think i was pretty lucky so far or maybe people simply are not so bad as some may think they are.

[Ietrio · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is quite small. Yet it is full of fluff. Repeats. Wordy. And what is going to come over and over again. In the end the contents is about a few short blog posts or one multi page post.

And the reasoning is about the quality of the average motivational speaker: one of the authors read in the newspaper about a funny study. Thus the authors worked that in as proof of their word view.

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book about customer service was interesting enough to keep me away during my hour-long commute! It was clear, had good examples and was pretty funny too.

Parts of it are more pertinent to businesses than libraries, but it was still a worthwhile listen.

[Nabeel Nasir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read on improving your responses in dealing with customers.

[Anita · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nothing new. I know I have to be calm, thank you. Unuseful book, too obvious.

[Alishah Novin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great and practical ideas

While some aspects are common sense, there's a good set of practical exercises, actionable items and changes to put into effect.

[Richard Webb · Rating 4 out of 5]

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