Dealing with difficult customers can be frustrating and challenging. But what you may not realize about these more challenging customers? How essential they are to the success of your business! As wild as it seems, difficult customers can actually be an asset to your business rather than solely a frustration or a liability.
Whether customers come across as impossible to please, demanding or hard to communicate with (or all of the above), they offer you invaluable opportunities to improve your business with each interaction.
What Makes Difficult Customers an Asset to Your Business?
In today’s post, we’re going to share four ways to reexamine how you view challenging customers and how you can transform them into a business-building opportunity.
Difficult Customers Prevent You From Losing Future Customers
Sure, it can be emotionally draining to listen to an unhappy customer. But the truth is, not all unhappy customers speak up. Instead, they’ll stop doing business with you and disappear without giving you the chance to correct a perceived mistake.
By dealing with difficult customers, you receive important insights on what may prevent other customers from returning. They give you the opportunity to address the challenges they’re facing head-on. Then, you can implement strategies that can prevent these issues from coming up in the first place with future customers.
IT MAY NOT SEEM LIKE IT AT THE TIME, BUT DIFFICULT CUSTOMERS HAVE A LOT TO TEACH YOUR BUSINESS ABOUT CUSTOMER SERVICE.
They Help You Provide a Better Customer Experience
Many difficult customers are just looking for their concerns to be heard.
Have you ever noticed that by simply allowing a person to express their opinions and frustrations uninterrupted can instantly reduce an escalation? Dealing with difficult customers allows you to improve your listening skills. And at the same time, also improves your ability to resolve problems promptly and efficiently. These skills are key to providing excellent customer service. In fact, this is the foundation of a successful business.
By giving you the opportunity to turn sour situations into positive ones, difficult customers are more likely to become returning customers. Or at the very least, result in one less negative review about your business.
Difficult Customers Can Help You Increase Sales and Brand Loyalty
This is where difficult customer complaints are an invaluable learning tool.
Listening closely to a customer’s concern (regardless of whether you agree or not) allows you to see an alternative point of view on how your business can improve a product or service. Even if a difficult customer doesn’t return, their feedback may be just the tool you need to wow future customers and keep them (and their friends) coming back for more.
(Do you want to learn more about communicating with customers? Take a look at this post next: Communication for Everyone – How to Connect with External and Internal Customers)
They Help You Improve The Structure of Your Business
Although we’ve touched on the benefits of difficult customers when it comes to improving a product or service, they can also help you improve the overall structure and functioning of your business’s operations.
Handling a difficult customer requires patience, compassion, empathy and the motivation to provide a positive experience.
And let’s face it: no business is exempt from dealing with difficult customers.
So, why not choose to develop new protocols, trainings, and structures in your business to ensure you’re well equipped for challenging situations? As an added bonus, when staff members feel they’ve successfully dealt with a difficult customer, it boosts their motivation by seeing a return on their efforts.
As you can see, difficult customers are a good thing for business. Without them, you’re missing out on crucial feedback and information that could make all the difference in your success.
That being said, there are still ways to make these difficult customers less of an interruption and frustration for your business. And we can help! Click here to learn about our customer service trainings.
Did you learn a lot from this post? Here are three more to read next:
- 5 Steps to Resolving Customer Conflict & Managing Upset Customers
- Four Rules of Successful Customer Engagement
- Customer Service: Do the Little Things Make a Difference?
This post was first published in 2016 but it was updated in 2021 just for you.
