Customer Scenarios – How Would You Deal With an Angry Customer?

I read an article in the Times of India titled, “Why driving makes Indians angrier?”

The three reasons cited for this behavior were extreme weather conditions, heterogeneous society, and overcrowded roads.

I started wondering, why do customers get angry during customer service calls?

I talked to one of the agents who has spent more than ten years in the customer service function. He said that his customers often swore at him. He added that they were provided multiple training programs on handling demanding customers and communicating effectively with them.

These programs helped a lot, but they didn’t cut out the aggression among customers.

Angry Customer Scenarios

This was when we discussed further to determine what makes a customer angry. I am going to talk about a few scenarios.

Scenario 1

Imagine a customer calls up your customer service number, and he is taken through automated IVR options. He doesn’t find what he is looking for among the options, and you aren’t providing him a way to reach a customer service representative.

So, he navigates your IVR and finally figures out a way to reach a representative in 40 minutes. What do you think will be his state of mind? He is bound to be irritated and slightly angry.

When he gets on a call with the agent, the agent puts him on hold to help him and gets disconnected. Now, he has to navigate your IVR again to reach you, and this time it probably takes lesser time.

Let us assume that it takes 30 minutes, he is going to be fuming.

Isn’t there a way to let people reach representatives without customers going through automated systems? Ideally, your menu should always have an option to let your customers talk to an agent seamlessly.

Scenario 2

I called customer service to report an unauthorized transaction on my credit card.

What do I expect?

I am looking for help to reverse that transaction.

Instead, the representative says that he is listing the complaint, and he hands me a complaint number and tells me the SLA is 72 hours.

Besides, he didn’t tell me that he would block my card immediately and arrange to have a new card sent to my address.

After the call, I realize that the natural thing to do for me would be to block my existing card, so I call them again to register that request.

Shouldn’t I be fuming here?

Shouldn’t the agent be more informed about customer problems and ways to resolve them? The most important thing is housekeeping instructions that would provide reassurance to customers.

Scenario 3

I go to the customer experience center of an electronics firm asking for a replacement of my faulty headphone. This is during the warranty period, and they agree to replace the headphones. They mention that it would take 20 days for the replacement to be arranged.

They give me a service challan, which I misplace. Now, I call up the service center to check on the replacement. I am told that without the challan reference number, they would not be able to trace and replace my headphone.

How would you feel in such a situation? You would obviously be fuming.

Shouldn’t there be a better way to identify a customer with other inputs like mobile number, email address, physical address, name of the product, and date of service?

Scenario 4

I go to your eCommerce site to report a faulty delivery, and I am told that you have crossed the time to report. Hence, I am told to talk to the chatbot.

The chatbot keeps directing me to your web reporting system, which just denied my request. It doesn’t provide me an option to reach an agent as well seamlessly.

Then, I dig out the phone number from the website to call customer care and register my request.

Would I be happy with this customer experience?

Shouldn’t the chatbot be integrated with the internal systems and the customer care for me to switch communication seamlessly?

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There are many more scenarios that we can list here. However, the most thing that any customer experience organization should do is to ensure that they make the experience as less frustrating as possible.

Most times, the customers try to reach you for only transactional queries that can be handled by an intelligent system or an agent in less than a minute.

Design your customer experience to ensure that 90% of your customer queries are addressed within the first two minutes. This would make your customers happy and, in turn, society happier.

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