Dealing with Mr Angry

There will always be dissatisfied customers no matter how careful you are. Paul Clapham looks at effective customer service strategies

The man who never made a mistake never made anything. Like most

clichés, this happens to be annoy-ingly accurate. The businessman needs to recognise human fallibility, prepare for it and, as we shall see, profit from it.

Consider these statistics. The satisfied

customer tells four people; the dissatisfied customer tells nine people; the delighted customer tells 18 people; the angry customer, since you're wondering, tells two people - his lawyer and BBC's Watchdog.

So, how do you harness this word of mouth, capitalising on your satisfied and delighted customers and avoiding dissatisfied ones? It's obvious how valuable this is. To put it in pounds sterling, a customer satisfaction policy that really works could mean you don't need any publicity. Take that cost, put it straight into profit and see how wide your smile is.

Let's start by looking through the wrong end of the telescope: avoiding or solving customer dissatisfaction. This is not as negative as it sounds, because, strange as it may seem, the most delighted customer is one who has had a problem put completely right and fast.

Winning a customer's trust

Dig a bit deeper and it becomes less odd. The customer was satisfied with your offer at the outset. By solving a problem, you proved your reliability, your commitment to him as a cust-omer. You made him feel special, so he trusts you. There it is, that word trust - it's at the heart of quality customer service.

You should, therefore, have a clear policy to deal with the unhappy customer. As a licensee, you're selling products, but also providing a service and ambience, so you can't simply copy best practice elsewhere, which would be the no-quibbles returns policy operated by Marks & Spencer and Tesco.

But the mental attitude behind this approach - keeping the customer is more important than the profit on the individual sale - is worth adopting. It also encourages you to make your quality control as tight as possible, which, in itself, is a central plank in building customer satisfaction. Nevertheless, even with white-hot quality control and a positive attitude to customer service, you're still going to get Mr Angry at the bar at some stage. This is where the planned approach wins prizes.

In a small business, such as a pub, a hot potato lands in the manager's or licensee's lap pretty fast, not least because that's who Mr Angry insists on dealing with. You could well have this as your policy, regardless of what the customer demands. Sod's Law, however, insists that when Mr Angry turns up, the owner/manager will be off-site. What then?

Practice shows that, if a dissatisfied customer can have his problem put right by his first point of contact, he is more impressed than if it needs the boss's heavy hand to achieve a result. You have to empower your people.

Karl Marx will probably be spinning in his grave, because profit is the purpose of giving power to your people.

Employing the golden rules

You employed your staff for their personality and enthusiasm, not their problem-solving abilities. The truth is many of us hate addressing problems, so give your staff a structure to work with, starting with four golden rules:

1. Don't just try to get rid of this unhappy

person.

2. Aim for the simplest, fastest solution to his problem (which may not be the cheapest for you).

3. Apologise. ("I'm sorry you've been put to this trouble" doesn't admit fault but it will disarm the angry customer).

4. Action definitely speaks louder than words.

Training organisation, the Confederation of Professional Licensees (CPL), has more than 20 years experience advising licensed premises, so what does it recommend? First, take the unhappy customer to somewhere quiet. Ask open questions and let him vent his anger.

"Don't interrupt, just let the motor run down," says CPL chairman Paul Chase. "Your role is to be a good listener, not someone trying to win an argument." Repeat key points the customer makes to show you're listening. The aim is to have Mr Angry become reasonable again so you can meet him halfway.

Chase stresses that you have to put your own ego to one side in these situations. "Get past the negative emotion in order to re-instate reasonable behaviour. Sometimes, angry customers can place themselves in a situation where it is very difficult for them to back down, so provide the face-saver. There's no point winning the argument if you lose the customer - and other customers who might hear what's going on."

Sinead Murphy, manager of the Banker in the City of London, is a graduate of the Fuller's platinum training scheme, an ongoing programme that includes an approach to dissatisfied, aggressive or drunk customers.

Fuller's business is increasingly focused on table service and food sales, where customers are more picky, so they apply a basic principle of giving the customer what he wants. A case in point on wet sales is the Fuller's flagship brand London Pride, for which there is a correct serving approach - a clean, full, branded glass, with logo to the front. But if the customer likes a bigger head or some odd glass, he's paying. He has the right to be wrong.

The key point stressed by Murphy is communication. From taking the initial order, through to encouraging them to come back, you need to communicate; that way, she says, negatives are nipped in the bud and can be turned into positives.

Golden rules in action

The policy at the Thomas Rigby in Liverpool features these golden rules. If a customer doesn't like their beer, they get an alternative immediately. Bigger issues will always involve licensee Fiona Hornsby or a bar manager in her absence.

Hornsby believes that replacing food or drink, or offering a refund is better than starting an argument: "The customer is more important than the profit on a sale."

Fiona also says that they pre-empt many problems. They stock a changing range of cask ales and exotic foreign beers, so telling the customer "this is a black beer; this is a cloudy beer; the price of this is £4.50" prevents discontent in advance.