Helping difficult customers
Featured in the Using Emotional Intelligence at Work training manual
By Mike Bagshaw
Category: Emotional Intelligence
Credit price: 3 download credits (Single user)
This training activity looks at using aspects of Emotional Intelligence in a real world situation: dealing with the difficult customer. People in the front line, dealing with customers face to face, make all the difference to customer satisfaction. Being able to understand customer needs, seeking ways to increase customer satisfaction and offering appropriate assistance, are all crucial social behaviours. This training activity deals with a set of social skills – dealing with difficult customers, in particular, hostile ones. These situations engender strong feelings on the part of both the customer and the staff serving the customer. They require particularly emotionally intelligent behaviour.
You start by presenting a ‘difficult customer’ situation, and asking the participants how they would feel. This leads on to a short exercise where participants are asked to identify their emotional ‘hot buttons’ and the emotional needs behind our hot buttons are presented and discussed. An exercise is then conducted on how to help difficult customers. This involves presenting some key steps followed by a role-play exercise in which the group depicts situations they have experienced. After discussing the salient points of the role-play, you round the training activity off with a presentation of key points in ‘service to delight’ with particular emphasis on ‘moments of truth’ when interacting face to face with customers.
Who is it for: This training resource is intended for use by trainers to enable participants to look at emotionally intelligent ways of helping difficult customers.
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 4 |
| Max Group Size: | 12 |
| Typical Duration: | 01:50:00 |
| No of Pages: | 18 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Purpose: This training resource is intended for use by trainers with any group of front-line customer staff, on assertiveness programmes, and programmes aiming to improve customer service.
Download the training activity, Helping difficult customers as featured in the Fenman training manual; Using Emotional Intelligence at Work