From The Blog

Most of my industry work was dominated by blue-collar work, long before iPhones and iPads became ubiquitous. One of our main challenges was instructing clients on how to use our tools. Sometimes, this even meant teaching them to type a URL instead of searching for us on Google every time. With only about 30-40 employees, nearly everyone had to tackle these issues, and even the simplest problems often ended up with the development team.

There are countless aspects to this, but I want to focus on two key questions: Who are the developers, and what is your duty to your client?

The developers’ priorities are to build new features, keep existing features updated, and fix things when they break. Customer service staff should handle tasks like changing passwords or helping someone find a page without escalating to developers. Interrupting a front-end specialist with basic questions is inefficient. It took us far too long to understand this concept and train our staff accordingly, but in the end, it saved us time and improved response rates.

The second and most crucial point: you are not a therapist. We used to joke that we were all therapists. Some of us, including myself and other managers, were brought in to deal with angry clients. However, using pop psychology to manage client emotions is not our job. A therapist is trained to listen without judgment, not to fire clients, and to provide professional help.

Too often, we believed our job was to calm the client, make them feel happier, and leave them with a positive impression. This was a mistake. While clients should leave satisfied, we should not tolerate abusive behavior. Customer service agents need to understand that they do not have to endure mistreatment. It’s better to lose one difficult customer than a good employee who becomes disillusioned with their job because of constant abuse.

Our focus should be on building great projects and knowing when to walk away from toxic client relationships.

However, there’s a counterpoint: if you are running a small startup or a larger company looking to improve its image, taking a more empathetic approach is not a bad strategy. I’ll explore this idea further in an upcoming post.