With its quick response time and personal service, live support software has a high level of consumer satisfaction. This can be great for keeping a low churn rate, but things can get a little trickier when it comes to particularly irate or emotional customers.

Luckily, good old psychology can help to turn around challenging customers and leave them impressed with your service instead of taking their business elsewhere.

Active Listening

Active listening is a way of making sure you properly understand what customers are saying, while building rapport with them by showing your dedication.  It’s a great way for your staff to show customers that they care. Some techniques of active listening include:

• Paraphrasing back to the customer what you think they have said
• Summarizing
• Validating their issues

Expect Hostility

Training your staff to expect hostility from customers could improve the way they deal with complaints. A study by researchers at the University of British Columbia found that employees who expected to speak to rude customers reacted less strongly than those who didn’t. It’s much easier to provide good service from a place of calm; which leads on to our next point.

Alleviate Anxiety

It’s natural to have feelings of anxiety when encountering emotional customers. Anxiety can put your body into a state of fight or flight; and neither is good for customer service! You may just want to run away from the situation, in which case you will become withdrawn and will not be using your best efforts to help the customer. Or you may become hostile yourself, which is again, not ideal in this environment.

There are a number of ways to help with anxiety, MindTools recommend simply trying deep breathing.

Another technique is to reframe the anxiety as something positive to help you channel the adrenaline produced into solving the customers problem. It also gives you a chance to show customers that you care instead of being withdrawn or biting their head off.

Nurture Empathy

Facing uncomfortable situations can make staff members take things personally. Learning to see things from a customer’s point of view can help prevent this and could improve consumer satisfaction levels as customers feel like the employee really “gets” their problem.

Use Your Head

At the end of the day it all comes down to your staff managing their emotions well and addressing the customers’ own emotions in the right way. The secret is to use your analytics to track what is working for your business and what is not and adjust accordingly.  A quality live support software such as Xeno gives you everything you need for this, including post-chat surveys and a range of analytics. What’s more is they even offer a free for life plan.