Abusive Customers Cause Emotions Run High
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Abusive Customers Cause Emotions Run High
Dealing with customers, especially of late, has had its ups and downs. This is one of the jobs which can mess up a person’s emotional stability in a horrible manner since customer service involved dealing with all types of people as long as they are customers. This exposes a person to kind, humble, angry, irritated, and other categories of people who never allow the customer care even to talk or express the company’s stand. Some of these customers can be humiliating to think of and more so to deal with. Therefore, customer care service providers must always be prepared for anything and not always take what is said to them personally. The challenge of dealing with customers who are not considerate also comes with the burden of preparing for emotional “dryness” or merely the inability of a person to be adversely affected by what they are told. Therefore herein discussed is how dealing with an abusive customer leads to burnout and stress, personalities best acquainted with the ability to handle any customer and the role of emotional intelligence when it comes to dealing with customers (Gnewuch et, al. 2017).
Stress and burnout are everyday experiences of many people since almost everyone gets tired at some point in their lives. The stress of knowing that a person has to get back to the same kind of job daily and to go and deal with a particular person or people be it, customers, work-mates or boss, can cause a lot of emotional instability since a person keeps on thinking the worst that can happen and this never makes them do their job in the right manner. This stress ad burnout is even more critical to the individuals responsible for operating at the customer service desk in any company or organization. This is because people have different tissues which they go through every day, and life to the customer service providers becomes a mixture of every kind of person. The customer service providers experience the challenge of abusive language from the customer to the customer service agents. This is never seen as a good thing but rather as a way of being rude.
However, since the companies and organizations do not exist for the emotional, behavioral, and spiritual direction of a person’s life, it becomes tough to help some of their clients because of emotional instability and their issues which they amplify to the companies even for the smallest mistake done by the company or organization. This makes it very difficult not only for the company but especially for the customer care who receives this. Therefore, it is always essential for a company to train their customer service members on how they can do away with this issue of getting emotionally frustrated and how to channel these bitter feelings and anger caused by clients and customers.
Therefore it is true that dealing with abusive customers can lead to burnout and stress. Stress in the first place comes up with trying to please the customer who is not willing to be pleased and who is not willing to listen to the situation as it is. Therefore this already makes the customer service provider stressed about how he/she can put it for the customer to understand. This mostly happens when customers call to complain and give out their problems about a specific issue they do not like about that particular company or organization. This makes life difficult for the customer service providers and makes it at times unbearable as the customer service providers get too much emotional luggage they have to deal with. It is even made more difficult because most businesses value their customers and clients more than their employees. Therefore the customer care has to make sure that they accommodate and never show emotional anger or dislike.
This, even though intended for the company to retain its customers, brings a lot of emotional damage to the employees, especially the customer care people. From the continuous streams of stress, the customer acre personnel develops burnout as they do not have a way to deal with what they are going through. This is one of the undesired effects of working as a customer service personnel.
Deciding the person supposed to fill a certain position is always difficult unless a person has been close all through. Therefore this is a common challenge and it is the challenge I could face if I had to decide the people to get into a customer call center. The difference in people’s behaviors and traits makes it difficult or easy for them to be indifferent to situations, some of which are viewed as challenging and others viewed as suitable for anyone. Therefore it also follows that some individuals fit best for a customer service call center than others.
These differences come in from their personalities or experiences. A job of a customer service call center requires a person who can redirect his anger and thoughts and the anger and frustration that come along with the clients positively and make sure that it does not affect him or her negatively (Alkahtani, 2016). Therefore, if I were the hiring human resource manager at a call center, I would mainly check a person’s personality and traits and how much they can withstand emotional frustration.
The major personalities for consideration of this job include; the hard worker, empathizer, innovator, controller, the rock, the competitor, and the accommodator. From a general perspective, an agent of a customer service call center should overcome the emotional baggage thrown at them. Other qualities include their ability to solve problems creatively, empathy, proper organization, calm under pressure, good memory, optimism, team player among other factors which would make them perform very well in dealing with the customers. The empathy and intelligence of the one being employed should be used not only for the customers who call but also for the whole working environment (Herzig et, al. 2017).
Of the seven types of personalities present among service delivery among individuals, companies and working environments of late have a large number of empathizers. Even though this personality works well and empathizes with the customers if they are undergoing a problem, controllers are still the best choice and therefore this means I would choose a controller over an empathizer. This is because controllers use less energy in helping clients while the empathizers take more time to empathize with the client or customer which is unnecessary.
Controllers’ ability to keep calm under pressure, optimism, good memory, and other factors that qualify them for the job also makes them worthy of making peace reign among the employees and everyone around them. Controllers have different qualities within them and some of these include; Emotional intelligence, talkative and their ability to let their feelings be known to the other side of the talk. Therefore hiring this kind of person becomes a very crucial asset to the company. Therefore I would dismiss the other types of personalities or maybe cooperate with a few of them but rather concentrate and focus on controllers. Through this, the call center would be the most favorite of all people, and it would also be respected for quality service (Alkahtani, 2016).
Emotional intelligence means a person can put aside their emotions when dealing with the customer or rather be ready enough to face the customers from a very mature level whereby the customer is swayed back to what should be happening rather than beginning to talk with the same amount of anger which the customer uses. Therefore emotionally intelligent people remain calm and take time to think critically and respond to issues. This can help a lot in dealing with abusive customers. The nature of talking is that if a person is angry and I don’t get angry but rather keep calm and talk to them, I will make them calm. However, it is responding to a person with the same amount of anger which they use to attack me that means I would only accelerate and make the anger more and these areas always awkward instances whereby a customer and a customer care provider both are arguing over very few things which do not matter very much. (Kaptanoğlu, 2017).
By using emotional intelligence, a controller can sense what the customer is feeling. Therefore, they try to bring in solutions to the customers because they know what they want from afar. Through this, an emotionally intelligent customer care agent will express empathy to the person going through an issue, and in this case, the person is the customer. Here, the apprehension skill can be stated to be handling other people’s emotions. Along with this other apprehension skills which are essential and which emotionally intelligent people use are; dealing with personal emotions more readily, ability to push forward in the face of setbacks, sensing what the others are feeling, etc. therefore, through these dimensions, an emotionally intelligent person can deal with the others around them and in this case to deal with customers and clients.
Therefore, in conclusion, I can say that it is true that the work of customer service is considered difficult by most people. However, suppose a person is ready to be formed on how to deal with and handle different people. In that case, this is an opportunity for a person to get to know how much they can be social and what that they can make the world a better place by utilizing their strengths and recognizing their weakness however never allowing themselves into them and therefore through this it becomes possible for achievement to be realized and in this case for customer service to be made better.
References
Alkahtani, A. H. (2016). The influence of leadership styles on organizational commitment: The moderating effect of emotional intelligence. Business and Management Studies, 2(1), 23-34.
Gnewuch, U., Morana, S., & Maedche, A. (2017, December). Towards Designing Cooperative and Social Conversational Agents for Customer Service. In ICIS.Herzig, J., Shmueli-Scheuer, M., Sandbank, T., & Konopnicki, D. (2017, September). Neural response generation for customer service based on personality traits. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (pp. 252-256).Kaptanoğlu, R. (2017). An application on organizational commitment and emotional intelligence. Balkan and Near Eastern Journal of Social Sciences,(IBANEZ), 3(3).
Latif, H., Majoka, M. I., & Khan, M. I. (2017). Emotional intelligence and job performance of high school female teachers. Pakistan Journal of Psychological Research, 333-351.
