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.
     

How Does Being With Dishonest People Effect You Physically and Mentality? How Do You Feel Around People With Integrity?

One of the most significant aspects of integrity, of doing the right thing and being with other people who have integrity is that it calms your central nervous system. I am an expert in nonverbal communication. When you are in the presence of an honest person who has integrity your body calms and unfolds, breathing deepens moving from high in the chest to the belly.

Research shows that our limbic responds to danger by going into Freeze, Flight, Fight, Fall/Faint or Friend response. When we are stressed, doing something wrong or dangerous, or when we are in the presence of someone who is out of integrity, who is lying, doing something wrong, and or is dangerous and or pathological our limbic response to the danger. Our blood pressure rises, our heartbeat increases, our cortisol levels may rise, we may flush to the surface of the skin, or blood may rush from the face and to our extremities, leg, and hands so we can run and or fight.

Surrendering is realizing you can’t control everything. But you can let go of people that are out of integrity in your life. You surrender to the fact they won’t change; they won’t suddenly be who you want them to be. If they are close to you, you surrender to the loss, surrender to the fantasy of how you would like the relationship to be or even how it use to be.

And if you must interact with them the best way to stay safe and stress-free is to surrender your emotional response to them. Go grey rock. Stay calm and centered. Don’t let them trigger you. Let go of emotional responses or reactions. If your limbic system still gives you a message of danger listen and respond, but if it’s just gameplaying don’t play. 

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.
     

Why Do People Yawn When Other People Yawn? Emotional Contagion. By Body Language Expert Patti Wood

Have you ever noticed that we yawn when someone else yawns?  Occasionally we yawn when someone else yawns, as a response to shared exhaustion, but most often a matching yawn is due to a phenomenon called emotional contagion.

It's part of the phenomenon of Isopraxism, the pull towards the same energy that occurs in nature. Isopraxism explains why birds fly together in formation, fish swim together in schools, and why we see the wave coming around the football stadium and say we are not going to do it, but we get pulled into the wave. We pull towards the same energy to save energy. In human relationships, we tend to match people we like and feel comfortable being around.

For years the research on yawning said that matching was not the cause of mutual yawning, but I disagreed. Now recent research supports the matching hypothesis. Though the original yawner may yawn because they are tired and or lack oxygen, the matcher yawns back out of kindness. Steven Platek, a research professor in biomedical science at Drexel University in Philadelphia did research empathy. He found highly empathetic people could not help but match someone's yawn.

You may notice this in Gorillas and great apes match their fellow Gorillas and ape body language. Not quite a case of monkey see monkey do, more like gorilla see gorilla do.

So next time someone matches your yawn, you will know they are a nice empathetic person. You might want to fake a yawn today, just to see how much people care!

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.
     

What is a PERP WALK. Who Popularized the Perp Walk? Trump, Giuliani and the origin of the Perp Walk.

As a body language expert I have been analyzing perp walks for the media for many years. The perp walk or frog march is a practice of law enforcement of taking an arrested person through a public space, creating an opportunity for public scrutiny and these days the media to take photos and videos of the event. Historically it was done to show the public that justice was being done, that an arrest had been made and that the public could trust that the public officials were doing their jobs well and they would be safe from the bad guys. It's interesting that Perp walks are often associated with big cases in New York City because U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, wanted to be known as tough on crime, and he loved publicity so when suspects charged with felonies in New York he always had them perp-walked and typically did news interviews about the case. 

Here is more about it from Wikipedia. 

In the United States, once a person has been charged with a crime, the government may request that a judge either issue a summons for that person or an arrest warrant, which can lead to a perp walk. The choice of which to request is largely at the discretion of the prosecutor, with judges often deferring to it.^[4]

Since the arrest power is meant to ensure the defendant's presence in court, lawyers defending the white-collar criminals who have been perp-walked since the late 1980s have complained it is unnecessary and superfluous in their clients' cases, even if it does give the appearance of preferential treatment for wealthy defendants.^[4] Lea Fastow, the wife of former Enron executive Andrew Fastow, cited the perp walk she was made to take even though she had expressed her willingness to surrender to a summons in an unsuccessful motion for a change of venue.^[5] Some, like Martha Stewart, have still managed to avoid being perp-walked by responding to summonses, or surrendering in the courtroom as soon as the indictment is presented in open court.^[4]

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.
     

Young Man Shot Through Door., Why Do Men Assume Someone Is Dangerous When They Are Not? ,Gender Differences in Reading Body Language, Ralph Star Shooting

Someone is knocking at the door.

Today I’m sitting at my desk, my puppy at her little dog bed desk working on a speech. As always, I look for the most recent scientific research to support my points and recommendations.

In my speeches, I often ask my audience who is more accurate at reading body language males or females. Because I know that that’s not fully inclusive the first thing, I looked for was any research on not just males' and females’ ability to read body language but, LGBTQ differences in ability. As I suspected, there wasn’t any research on that. You probably know that many research studies are just done on males because you must have so many more subjects in your subject pool to consider gender differences. In fact, In medical research often less than 6% of the research includes female subjects.

Overall, the research says that females are more accurate than males at reading body language. But here is something interesting. New research shows that women are more accurate at reading negative emotions such as anger and men are more accurate at reading happy body language cues. And one of the studies they were looking at displays of someone knocking on a door the men could more accurately read the happy knocking cues and the women could more accurately read the negative cues such as anger.  And were far more accurate at reading the neutral knocking.

And that made me think of the horrible Ralph Star Shooting Story in the news that broke my heart and continues to haunt me.
A young man went to pick up his siblings a few blocks from his house but accidentally went to the wrong house, and knocked on the door. The owner of the home opened the wood door but not the glass door, saw the young man look him in the eye, and said, “Don’t ever come back here.” and shot the teen in the head through the glass door then shot him again once he was down. Did the man do this based on racial profiling? How often are men’s violent responses to strangers also triggered because they are less able to accurately read facial cues of danger so they assume someone is dangerous when they are not? 

Also shattering me is the fact that when I went to look up the story again I googled young man shot through the door at pages of other stories about other young men being shot through doors came up. I am so upset. 

Here is the research study mentioned.

 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00016/full#:~:text=The%20findings%20show%20that%20gender%20affects%20accuracy%20rather,to%20excel%20in%20recognition%20of%20hostile%20angry%20knocking. 

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.