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Which is More Challenging, Handling Angry Customers Face to Face or Over the Phone?



Both are difficult, and now there are certainly issues of personal safety that come into play in face to face in customer service interactions, but in my experience designing and conducting customer service training for a broad range of businesses is that phone interactions are more difficult.

First, the customer may have been frustrated or angered for a longer length of time before they get on the call, often escalating their emotional state.

They may have had to wait or be transferred before getting on the call with the right rep so again their negative emotions can escalate. There is an entire body of research on hold time and transferred calls' effect on customer service.

They may feel safer and shielded by physical distance anonymity, they are not right there in front of you, so even a little old lady customer who never yells or cusses in public could become a ranting maniac.

You don’t have all their body language cues to read so you can understand them and help them and relate to them personally more easily on a human level. You can exchange up to 10,000 cues with one person in a face-to-face interaction and you miss out on that rich information on the phone. It can be harder for you to relate to them if you are just going from a bad complaining customer to a bad complaining customer.

 In addition, they can’t see all your nonverbal cues and may react to you as a nebulous faceless “other” the company that, “Did them wrong” the enemy instead of a living breathing real human being.

You also don’t have access to many “de-escalating” techniques, such as nonverbal listening cues, like head tilts and head nods, look/look away constant eye contact, open body windows (like open heart, open palms, relaxing posture moves, side by side engagement, the list goes on and one. On the phone, you can do vocal matching and mirroring, which is very powerful, but you have to learn all the intricacies of matching and mirroring so it is authentic. 




Patti Wood, MA - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com.