Dealing with difficult customers

Personal attitude

• Positive attitude and friendliness as a starting point
• Sensitising to body language, choice of words and voice
• Perception as a factor influencing one's own communication
• Development of sympathy and antipathy

Customer types in difficult conversation situations

• Recognising behavioural patterns of difficult customers
• Perceiving and managing customer expectations
• Interpreting the behaviour of difficult people
• Which customer characters are particularly challenging for me?

Conducting conversations with difficult customers

• Identifying areas of tension in customer conversations
• Recognising difficult customers and reacting appropriately
• Active listening and questioning techniques in challenging conversations
• Dealing with talkative, know-it-all, cynical and choleric people

How to deal with complaints and grievances

• Most frequent causes of customer conflicts
• Rhetorical competence in complaints
• Using complaints as an opportunity
• Developing and demonstrating solutions

Dealing with open confrontation in customer contact

• Dealing confidently with aggressive behaviour
• Reacting correctly to personal attacks
• Selecting the level of escalation and controlling the course of the conversation
• Solution- and conclusion-oriented communication

This training will provide you with the necessary skills to conduct difficult conversations with your customers in a confident and goal-oriented manner. Based on your own positive attitude, you will be able to distinguish between different types of difficult customers, adapt your de-escalating rhetoric to the situation and constructively point out possible solutions.

In the seminar Dealing with Difficult Customers you will learn:

• Understand the thinking patterns of difficult customers
• how to adapt your conversation management according to the type of customer
• how to deal professionally with a customer's negative emotions
• Influence the atmosphere of the conversation positively
• Develop your customer contact into a customer relationship

This training is characterised by its strong practical relevance. For this purpose, the basics for constructive communication with difficult customer types are presented at the beginning by means of trainer input and impulse lectures. In exercise units that simulate different escalation levels of difficult customer conversations, participants can apply the action and reaction patterns shown. Feedback on the exercises is based on trainer, group and video feedback. Discussions of case studies in plenary, group work by means of role play and the use of seminar documents round off the methodical implementation in the seminar Dealing with Difficult Customers.

This event is aimed at those employees, specialists and managers who are regularly involved in telephone, video-based or personal customer communication. Furthermore, it is for people who have set themselves the goal of using conversational situations with critical, difficult and dissatisfied customers as opportunities and being able to conduct the dialogues in a more confident and relaxed manner.

You would like to hold the seminar Dealing with Difficult Customers in your company as an in-house seminar? That is of course possible! We will be happy to prepare an individual offer that meets your content priorities, your specified time frame and other wishes. Please send your in-house enquiry to: kontakt@drgkitzmann-akademie.de

In the seminar Dealing with Difficult Customers, participants are given the opportunity to present situations with difficult customers from their own everyday professional life as case studies. The aim is to maximise the benefit of the training for each individual by making the training scenarios as real as possible. Based on the practical simulations, solution approaches are developed in the seminar group and then practised. In this way, it is already possible during the seminar to try out dealing with difficult customers to see whether the conversation tools developed are practical and purposeful, for example for use in a call centre. It is of central importance that each seminar participant remains authentic and feels comfortable in the context of applying the new conversation techniques in the complaint conversation.

In a society that is becoming increasingly harsh and direct, even our own customers are not spared. In addition, clients are under pressure to perform, time pressure and price pressure due to the increasingly global and digital working world. In this respect, it helps to be aware that in many conflict situations that are perceived as challenging, it is not the customer himself who is difficult, but the environment in which he has to assert himself every day. Understanding these influences and consequently being able to deal with a difficult customer in a calm and de-escalating manner is already the first successful step towards a loyal customer through appreciative customer care.

The Dealing with Difficult Customers Seminar is not only available as open training, but also as e-learning, live webinar or in-house presence events. Call us today to get a quote for the workshop option that suits your needs.