How do deal with an angry customer!!

Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way; this is not easy.

~Aristotle

Lately, I have been working a lot with medical practices on how they can improve the service they provide their patients. While most of the examples I will share in this column are pulled from this work, the concepts are applicable to each and every business. 

Among all these practices, issues with angry patients seem to be a common thread, which is not entirely surprising when you consider that patients come in feeling poorly and it does not take much to set them off. Whether it is too much paperwork or a long wait time, there are a number of factors that can increase a patient’s frustration and incite their anger.

When I first began working with these practices, I had no idea how extensive this problem was but, as I spoke with the frontline staff, they named angry patients as the number one problem they face time and time again.

Whether it is a patient or another kind of customer, the best and most effective tactic for dealing with an angry person is to show empathy for their situation. Saying “These are just the required forms and you need to fill them out in order to see the doctor,” just will not do it. A better approach would be for the receptionist (the “director of first impressions”) to say, “I am so sorry to ask you to fill out this paperwork again, but it will ensure our records are correct so we can get you the best possible care.” The second statement shows empathy and offers a logical explanation for why the data needs to be collected again.

Even though we can empathize with a customer’s frustration, it is never acceptable for them to raise their voice or use profanity. If this should happen, your staff needs to tell the customer that kind of behavior is unacceptable and warn them that if it continues, they will be asked to leave. For obvious reasons, you will also want to steer these angry customers away from your other customers and talk with them one-on-one.

Unmet expectations, in general, are the cause of most angry patient situations. However, a lot of the anger can be mitigated by wording responses in such a way that you communicate warmth and caring.

For example, one of the most common inciters among these medical practices is a co-pay that is higher than the patient expected. In a case like this, the front office personnel could say, “I am so sorry that you were expecting a lower payment. Do you have another means of paying today or would you like for us to bill you? Which would you prefer?” A response like this puts the power back in the patients’ hands.

I would say the best direction you can give your staff about how to deal with an angry customer is to call in the manager and allow them to handle the issue. Front office staff should not be saddled with always having to take the abuse from angry customers. These frequent beatings destroy their morale and their desire to come to work each morning.

As a final caution, avoid arguing with an angry customer at all costs. This just tends to make the person even angrier.

Now go out and make sure your staff is trained in handling angry customers. Frequent and continuous role-playing activities are a good way to ensure they are able to respond appropriately in the moment.

You can do this.

Are you too busy?

Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.

~Tim Kreider

A recent column in the New York Times really caught my attention. The column was entitled “The Busy Trap,” and in it, author Tim Kreider talked about how so many people are too busy and they feel guilty if they are not doing something work-related all the time.

I am mentoring a very talented executive and we were recently discussing the vacation he was mandated to take. I asked him to take just four hours every day of his vacation and unplug completely from work. He replied that he could not commit to that because if he did not have this to do, he would not know what to do.  This executive had fallen into the “busy hole” and had no way of climbing out.

However, after much discussion and cajoling I finally got him to agree to try this four-hour plan. In the beginning it was excruciatingly painful for him, but as the vacation progressed, he began to look forward to the time he had to be with his family away from work concerns. He shared with me later that by the end of the week, he felt so great during these four-hour breaks that he wanted to continue the process of getting out of the “busy hole.”

When I think about my earlier years and ask other people if they were as busy 30 years ago as they are today, they all emphatically say, “No!” They were a lot calmer, and life just seemed to move much more slowly in the 1980’s. Why? My theory is that it has a lot to do with the ease of communications we have today.

In the early 80’s most people did not have personal computers, and if they did, there was no Internet.  Now that we have become so “connected,” we stay tethered to our businesses and friends almost 24 hours a day.  When I forget my phone at home, I feel almost naked and have to rush back to get it.

It is unhealthy for entrepreneurs and managers to be accessible 24/7. The stress stays with them all day and night and they have no opportunity to unwind. We all need time to just be, and with this never-ending flow of communications, so many of us do not get a chance to enjoy the moment.

I, myself, am a recovering busy addict. I now leave my phone and computer off after 6 p.m. – which, I will admit, is still tough. However, I have been sleeping much better and I know this daily break is what I really need.

I also try to take more trips where I can make myself inaccessible to calls, texts and e-mails. No matter what I do while away, I feel so much calmer when I return because I have allowed myself to unplug from these sources of stress.

Now go out and make sure you take some time every day to step away from phones, texts and e-mails. I promise that once you get used to this new habit you will feel so much better and even more productive.

You can do this.                                

Honesty is so Important!

Honesty is so important

I have found that being honest is the best technique I can use. Right up front, tell people what you're trying to accomplish and what you're willing to sacrifice to accomplish it.

Lee Iacocca

  There is a story about a retiring CEO who was unsure of whom his replacement would be. He called a meeting of his top aids and said that he was going to give the position to the executive who could get the greatest results from a seed he would give them today but measure the outcomes in six months.

   One of the senior management team was Bill who just could not get this seed to grow at all though he tried so hard with different fertilizers, alternative lighting patterns and all kinds of potting soil. He just did not know what he was going to do.

  On the morning before the presentation of the results of this test, Bill was talking to his wife about what should he do. She recommended that honesty was the most important attribute for a chief executive and for him to show the pot with no growth from this seed. Bill was so reluctant to do this.

  Bill decided to follow his wife’s advice and went to this meeting with his empty pot.  When he saw the others results, he felt like a failure. Their plants were lush with growth and all were at least 4 feet high. He was so embarrassed not to have any results and many times he thought about just leaving the meeting rather than being embarrassed in front of the entire staff.

   At the meeting the CEO asked each of his team to show him the results and to tell him how they had achieved such amazing results. Of course Bill hung back and was the last to show the CEO his pot but then went up and said I tried just about everything I could think of, but I just could not get the seed to grow.

  With this statement the CEO made the announcement that he decided whom his replacement was going to be. He said Bill was going to be the next CEO as he was only person that was honest about the seeds. He went on to explain that he had boiled the seeds before hand so that there was no way for them to grow at all and Bill was only one who was honest.

   While this is only a story it clearly shows the value of honesty. Without honesty there is no trust as trust is predicated on honesty.  Honesty just should be the foundation of every enterprise.

  As a CEO or manager you have to be incredibly honest to gain the respect of your staff and to insure that they will be honest to you. I once asked some of my staff if they had to choose me to be honest or nice, but not both, towards them, what would they choose? They all appreciated my being nice but they really valued my honesty and did not want to give that at all up.

   Being a leader, you have a higher responsibility about honesty. You are the role model and unless you can demonstrate this quality on a consistent basis, you just are not going to get your staff to be honest with you.

  Now go out and make a commitment to be as honest as you can be to everyone whom you have contact with. I promise you that your life will be much better and your organization will operate with higher levels of efficiency.

  You can do this!

Hire Smart to Make your Business Successful

According to legend, one day a man was wandering in the desert when he met Fear and Plague. They said they were on their way to a large city where they were going to kill 10,000 people. The man asked Plague if he was going to do all the work. Plague smiled and said, No, I'll only take care of a few hundred. I'll let my friend Fear do the rest.

Anon.

  There is no decision in your business that is more important than the hiring decision. Each business rises or falls on its ability to  hire not good staff but great staff. One of the important qualities in hiring, is acqiring smart people. It is okay, however, if your new hires are smarter than you. In fact, I would claim that for your business’s ability to succeed and flourish you need to surround yourself with people that are smarter that you are.

  I was consulting with a business that had around 35 employees. While the staff was hard working and very loyal, they were not the sharpest group of employees that this firm could have gotten.

  I did spend a considerable amount of time learning to understand what drove the entrepreneur’s thought process in terms of not hiring smart staff. There is no question in my mind that the entrepreneur, just did not feel as if he could adequately manage staff that were smarter than he was. He just felt very intimidated by smart people and he just did not to be around these type of people.

  Additionally, this entrepreneur’s business was stalling out with declining sales and profitability. Now, in all fairness, the effects of the economy were largely responsible for these declines but they could have been mitigated by hiring talented and smart people to help in this entrepreneurs business.

  I spent so much time with this entrepreneur getting him to see very clearly that one of the biggest reason why his business was not surviving very well was because of his hiring decisions. As we dove deeper into the real reason for this “fear,” we quickly found out that this entrepreneur only had one year in college and felt bad that he had not progressed further with his formal education. Because of the guilt that he felt that these smarter and better educated potential staff members would further make him feel guilty for his lack of education, his business was suffering.

  When I was finally, after many hours of conversations, got him to see and feel that his guilt and fear was holding the business back. This was not an easy process as these were very deep seated beliefs.

   Now he is slowly starting to hire smarter people with commensurate results. However, this is going to be a very difficult for him but now he knows what he needs to do to make his business successful.

   In order to hire smart staff you need to be willing to take the risk, that your image might get tarnished by not being as smart as they are. However, not taking the risk to hire smart people could lead to the complete demise of your business.

  Now go out and make sure that all of your future hiring decisions that you make that you hire the smartest people that you can possibly get.

   You can do this!!

 

How to Manage a Micromanger

“Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don’t interfere as long as the policy you’ve decided upon is being carried out.”

~Ronald Reagan

Recently, I wrote a column about how ineffective micromanaging is and urged all micromanagers out there to alter their ways so they can be better leaders. Micromanaging seldom works and it destroys the fabric of the team.

Since writing that column, I have been inundated with notes from readers asking what they can do if they have a boss who micromanages. The first place to start would be to find out what is triggering their micromanaging. It can not always be assumed that it is the manager’s problem.

Often, micromanagers over supervise because they feel the employee is just not doing the job. I have seen many situations where employees are complaining loudly about a manager they claim is a micromanager only to discover that it is actually the employees who are the ineffective ones. In cases like these, the solution is to build the manager’s trust. The employee needs to prove to their boss that they do not need this constant supervision.

In the event the problem is not an employee performance issue, you will need to have a strategy for dealing with your micromanaging boss. This strategy must start with very honest dialogue.

During this conversation, you might ask your boss something like, “You seem to be managing me very closely. In order to do a better job, what can I do to improve your trust in me?” Keep it very positive and be honest. Honesty is critical as is really listening to what your boss is saying to you.

You may also want to ask your manager how they would like you to communicate your progress on the projects you are working on. Most managers just want to know how things are progressing. Many are simply fearful that things will fall between the cracks. The more you can allay this fear, the better, so it might be helpful to provide regular progress updates.

This is such a small thing, but I have seen this work well in so many cases. The more you communicate to your boss about the status of your work, the less they will micromanage you.

Now there may come a time when you really, really like your job but your boss is giving you grief by micromanaging you. In these cases, you have to do a cost benefit analysis to see if staying is worthwhile. That is, you will need to ask yourself if the benefits of working at a job you love makes tolerating the micromanager a fair tradeoff.

If you have done everything you can, but nothing changes with your micromanager, you may get to the point where you will need to seriously consider leaving the job. Working for a micromanager is very stressful, and we need less stress in our lives, not more.

Now go out and make sure you do everything you can to find out why your boss is micromanaging you. Communicate often so your boss learns to have more and more trust in you. If all else fails, looking for another job might be the only viable alternative.

You can do this!

Allow access to Social Media by your Staff

“Being social, even outside the confines of the company, makes workers more comfortable and happy.” ~Kevin Rice, AT Kearney I was recently consulting with a company when the CEO made a comment about how many of her employees were using social media networks instead of working. After walking through the office to talk to her staff, she had become concerned about how much time they seemed to be spending on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, despite the fact that many were continuously saying they are overworked. In light of this, she wanted to pull the plug on all social network access. After hearing this business owner’s experience, I was convinced that the best strategy was to prohibit access to all social networking sites during the work day. However, after doing some research and talking to others in the field as I prepared for this column, my posture has changed dramatically. I am a new convert to the school of thought that allowing social networking use is good business policy. A study conducted by an industrial research firm recently showed that 50 percent of the large firms surveyed allow their employees to access social media, and they predict that will grow to 70 percent in a couple of years. Obviously the trend among large companies is to allow employees access to these sites. While the percentage of small firms permitting social media use is much lower, I really feel they need to follow the larger corporations’ lead and consider opening this up to their employees. With the advent of smart phones, your staff has the capability of accessing social media even if you prohibit it on the computer system. In the end, the same amount of time will be consumed. For those who are unconvinced by the “they are going to do it anyway” argument, look at it this way. It is increasingly commonplace for your employees to put in workdays much longer than the standard eight hours as they continue to work from home long after they have left the office. Many of your employees feel that they deserve a break after working on an in-depth analysis of some aspect of your business, and more and more companies have made the decision to permit social media access in order to compensate their staff for this personal time. Another common occurrence is for employees to have their personal e-mails delivered to their company account, which means they are spending some of their work time answering personal e-mails. As these observations show, your staff is using your IT resources for personal purposes in so many different ways these days. This is just the world we live in, and it must be accepted if we want to keep our staff happy. An open policy about social networking is also a great recruiting tool for new and younger employees. These Gen Y folks think of computers and technology as their birthright, and being denied this creates some difficult situations. Now, does this mean that you allow workers to use social media for an inordinate amount of time? Of course not. There is a big difference between a reasonable amount of use and abusing the privilege. Though having a policy permitting open access makes it more difficult to let an employee go on the basis of excessive use of the web and social media, good management practices should be able to handle this situation in the majority of cases. Now go out and consider implementing a policy that allows use of social media and the web. There is no question in my mind that this is good policy for both the company and the employee. You can do this!

Greeting your Customers is so Important!

Worry about being better; bigger will take care of itself. Think one customer at a time and take care of each one the best way you can. Gary Comer   Recently I was looking for some new wood flooring for my townhouse. I really did not know what I needed or the pros and cons of different options(and there are tons of them) and had no idea on the coloring of the wood as well.  Trying to be a wise consumer, I went to no less than 5 wood flooring stores. With the construction business being down, I was expecting to get a red carpet rolled out for me with a drum fanfare. However, anything but this occurred. Rather than cheers going up when I arrived I was completely ignored by 3 of the stores and with one store I could not even find one employee to ask a question even though the store was wide open.    Greeting a customer should just not be something of undue importance. Rather it should be the utmost importance and one that cannot be forgotten for any business. After all a warm greeting by an employee is a significant part of the first impression of every store and every business.  If a customer is not greeted when they arrive, the customer assumes, whether it is right or wrong does not matter,  that this business just  does not need or want to help the customer.    Now I am sure that many employees do not like to greet customers as sometimes customers can be very unfriendly. However, whether the customer is unfriendly, mean, or looking squirly, each and every customer “must” be greeted within 30 seconds of their arrival. A greeting is a way of saying, thank you for coming into our store or business today and we appreciate the opportunity to serve you. I have seen many cases where a salesman goes up to greet a customer that looks very rough only to sell them over $10,000 in products. The point being is that every customer must be greeted as if they are the most important person in the world to the staff member greeting them.   Every business spends so much on advertising and promotion, and to blow it on not having a greeter, just is not a good idea. I recently stopped by a real estate office with a good friend that wanted to buy a new house. We arrived at the office at the correct time, but no one was around at all. Only by hollering at 10db or higher, we were we able to finally pull someone out of their secret hideout to come and help us. We almost walked out of the office, if it was up to me I would of. Regardless, both of us quickly realized that the message that was being sent was that we were not important even though there might be a large commission in the works for the salesperson and agency.   While I could go on and on in terms of the poor greetings that I have personally received and so many people have told me about theirs.  The point is that this happens on a regular basis and just cannot be tolerated in any successful business.    Now just telling the staff that you expect to greet a customer is 30 seconds or less in that if you lay out the expectation, then you must inspect to insure that this is happening. Inspecting just cannot be a one time affair but must be continually done to insure that your expectations are being me.    Now go out and make sure that you have a very effective process in place to insure that each customer gets greeted with a smile and warm welcome within 30 seconds of their arrival.   You can do this!