As a customer service professional, understanding the mechanics of stress and the vital role human interaction plays in the process can be an advantage in diffusing volatile situations. We all know what it's like to be on the receiving end of customer fury, but do you really know what's going on in your customer's mind while it happens?
When things go wrong, most people experience a mix of emotions - everything from anger to disappointment, and everything in between. Add on top of that the frustration at not being in control or being able to fix things yourself, and you can see how a normally calm and loyal customer can become a frontliner's worst nightmare.
The only thing that will change from situation to situation is the level of stress, and this usually correlates to the perceived "value" of the transaction at hand. Some situations are just a plain nuisance (your bank statement gets misdelivered), others super-frustrating (your cell phone gets unexpectedly disconnected), and some situations are just plain heartbreaking (the package with your wife's anniversary present doesn't arrive). Depending on the potential consequences and inconvenience of the situation, you can expect a customer's stress levels to match accordingly.
All stress responses have an associated physiological reaction in the body's nervous system, triggering a rush of hormones (including adrenalin) that do everything from bumping up the heart rate to constricting blood vessels. At extreme levels, a customer can actually "see red", and have little control over their physiological reaction to the stress, let alone their emotional reactions!
There's generally three different ways a person will respond to this "fight or flight" reaction:
Pedal to the metal: Hyper-emotional, angry and agitated, hot tempered.
Slam on the brakes: Withdrawal, shut down, emotionally depressed.
Go Stop Go Stop: Outwardly frozen and lacking emotion, but seething with fury underneath, too angry to do or say anything.
Another element to understand is that competence in judgement is always compromised under stress. For most people, this means that when stressed, they generally make poor judgements and therefore poor decisions; while others may actually experience improved performance in this area (astronauts call this "the right stuff"!).
Stress also narrows the focus of attention for individuals, meaning their ability to take in new data or pay attention to areas outside of the stressful situation are limited. A consequence of this can be exaggeration of the situation and/or consequences, due to the fact that the customer can't see the "bigger picture" at the time.
To top all this off, if the customer was already stressed before the incident, and encounters a new stress on top of the old stress, this too can exacerbate the response and reactions to the new situation. You can see this when people move into a new house only to discover the electricity hasn't been turned on yet, and it's 5pm and getting dark -- beware the frontliner taking that call!
As well as having three distinct reactions to stress, people also pass through three separate stages of stress; however depending on the situation they may not pass through all of them.
The first stage is obviously the "alarm" stage, where all those hormones I mentioned already get triggered, and the body reacts to the situation at hand. Depending on how quickly your customer can get in touch with you after the incident, they'll generally still be experiencing this "hormone high" when they land in your lap, and can be the most difficult stage to get them through.
The second stage is "resistance", and if the alarm stage isn't resolved quickly a person slips into a different state of mind where their energy levels start reducing, and they can feel impatient and exasperated. During this stage, customers may have trouble remembering important details, may focus on trivial matters (like how long you kept them waiting on hold), and become less rational.
Finally, after quite some time, the customer enters the final stage of stress: exhaustion. The customer becomes both physically and mentally drained, experiences despair and even depression, and can become quite retaliatory in their interactions with those trying to help them. Overly sensitive, customers can quickly slip back to any of the previous two stages at any sign of volatility. They're difficult to deal with at this stage because they feel defeated, have given up, and are more interested in just complaining that getting things fixed.
You can see from this journey that the earlier you can diffuse the stress for the customer, the easier it'll be for you as a frontliner to deal with them. The further along in the stages the person goes during stress, the harder it will be for you to talk them down. It's important, too, that you understand the different reactions and communication methods a customer will use during each stage, so you can identify roughly where they are in the cycle and react accordingly.
There's some big lessons here that can really help you when dealing with a stressed customer, and the first is to always remind yourself -- the customer is generally not their normal selves. Their ability to think straight and make rational decisions is impaired, they attention span is narrowly focussed on you and your company and the problem at hand, and this situation may well be the icing on the cake for what could already be a bad day.
Getting a grip on these concepts will help you use your number one tool when combating a stressed customer -- empathy. I've talked before about customer service frontliners as the gate-keepers to all the solutions a company can offer a customer, and empathising with not only their situation but their mental state can increase your ability to de-stress the customer, get to the bottom of the problem, and solve it quickly. Having human interaction with someone outside the problem can immediately begin lowering the stress response in a person, so long as that person is open, welcoming, receptive, empathizes and can help work out a solution. Remember : a problem shared is a problem halved! Taking 50% of the problem off the customer's hand is the least you can do!
Remember, too, that stress begets stress, and after you've solved the problems of the world, you, too, need to de-stress, calm down, and tend to the wounds you get from being a frontliner in the battle for customer service.
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