One of the most challenging customer care moments is picking up the phone or sitting down in a meeting and running into the “Bear in the Cave.” The customer is upset and angry. The result potential ranges from a customer relationship permanently damaged with significant satisfaction recovery expense, to a customer who loves you and reaffirms their decision to have partnered with you. The driving factor for your result is customer engagement skills, and the reality is most customer facing folks are not ready to effectively handle this situation.
Customer engagement masters quickly turn these situations into focused efforts to resolve issues and end up with the customer appreciating how you engaged. But, if team members are not ready for or capable of handling the bear in the cave, the situation can quickly deteriorate. The customer becomes even more upset. Teammates often bear in the cave each other in the investigation process. In an effort to salvage customer satisfaction, significant expense and gives are often thrown at the situation sucking profits from the business. These situations often bubble up through leadership sucking energy and comradery out of the organization.
How do you become great at handling bears in the cave? Unfortunately reading articles like this, attending seminars, or watching webinars does not do it. You have to role play these situations. The scenarios and players have to be real. The playing team needs to be cross functional, like the response mechanism is in the real world. Everyone has to be ready to get better and be ready to push through any concerns about how others execute, or rather don’t execute properly. There has to be a coach who calls it as they see it, delivers hard feedback, but also motivates focus, discussion and agreement on what we should do differently. A CEO can pull off the coaching role, but a VP often can’t because of suspected bias and a tendency to defend their team’s view of the world.
