How to Delicately Handle Difficult Customers – DSP 162

Sometimes there’s just that one customer. The “Problem Child” customer that you don’t like having to deal with. The one who totally know is definitely (probably) making things up to try and get a free float. And they’re such a nuisance! What can you do about that? Obviously you don’t want them getting vengeful if you tell them to kick rocks and spread lies about you.

How do you handle that situation? Well, Graham and Ashkahn lay out some nice ground rules for how they handle people and it comes down to setting clear boundaries that at least appear rigid on the outset. Then, if those boundaries are crossed, the reactions you have are totally expected.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Ashkahn: My name’s Ashkahn is what we’re supposed to say now.

Graham: This is the beginning?

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: We’re not done already? Graham, I’m Graham over here.

Ashkahn: All right, great. We got that done.

Graham: Today’s question is, “how do you handle a situation where the customer is 100% wrong?” There’s more here, “if not outright lying about something. For example, they come in for an appointment that they did not schedule, or they schedule one day but come in another, but blame you for the error. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s awkward, and I’m getting more and more bothered by being blamed for user error/idiocy. At what point can I tell them to kick rocks? I know we shouldn’t, but I really want to. Pull me back from the ledge. Thanks, fellas.”

Ashkahn: All right. That’s a good question. I say go for it, man. Like throw a swing.

Graham: Tell them to kick rocks, yeah.

Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s your business, you know. You just …

Graham: Yeah. Our stance is we kind of usually kill people with kindness when they start demanding too many things.

Ashkahn: I mean there’s always a chance they’re not lying, right? 100% is just a very bold claim. That they’re 100% wrong.

Graham: Yeah, I’ve slowly realized that throughout my life. I don’t say I’m 100% right about things anymore.

Ashkahn: After that incident. Just keep that in mind a little bit. There are times where it really seems like someone’s wrong, and then like two days later you’re like, “Oh yeah, no, I messed that up. That was my fault.” That’s not to say that people don’t totally just like lie and say that they, convinced they booked another day because they’re just trying to get out of having to pay a cancellation fee or whatever it is.

I think there’s a couple things going for you here. One, you’re a small business. You’re not Walmart, you’re not some giant corporation where people are constantly trying to game your system and pull one over on you. I think that works to our advantage in situations like this, mostly because stuff like this I think doesn’t happen super often as the result of that. Also because I think it just makes people feel guilty when they get away with things like that, that I kind of doubt someone would be a super repeat offender if this were to come up. Like if you were to, you know. I just don’t imagine you’d be like setting precedent if you were to be nice to someone even if they were lying, or not call them out on it, or do whatever. I don’t imagine they’d come back every day from then on to keep trying to screw you over.

Graham: Tell all their friends.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: “This place doesn’t care if you lie to them.”

Ashkahn: Yeah, I found this great loophole.

Graham: Come on, guys!

Ashkahn: We have that going for us too, where I think bigger companies have a little bit of a trickier time. If there’s a clear loophole in their systems, then people start exploiting it.

Graham: Also, and we’ve noticed this with some people who have more chronic disorders, but people find a lot of respite for very serious things in float tanks, and sometimes that involves medication that makes you a little loopier than normal, sometimes it’s just that their energy levels are really low. User error happens, and perhaps even more so when someone’s struggling with, again, a disorder that they have or with medications they’re taking or something like that. This comes in many ways. It can be sensitivity to temperature, it can be sensitivity to noise.

We’ve kind of just found that people who are experiencing the most pain in their daily lives, and often some of our customers, are also some of the most demanding and the hardest for us to deal with personally.

Ashkahn: At the end of the day, what are they scamming you out of? They’re scamming you to try to get into a float tank more. It’s not like this is some sort of money scheme they figured out, and they’re making $100 off of you or something like that. They’re just trying to float. Like at the end, that’s why they’re doing whatever they’re doing, so that they can float more. It probably means they probably really need to float really bad if they’re going to these lengths of lying and making stories up, or doing whatever they need to do to try to get into the float tank.

I think there’s a certain perspective where I think you can try to find some sympathy in thinking about it that way, like that. Maybe that can kind of back you off the cliff and make you not wanna punch these people.

Graham: Yeah, yeah. There does come a point too where firing your customers or just saying, “Hey, it might be better if you find somewhere else to float,” is totally an option. It’s probably different for different people, but especially if you’re the only one behind that front desk, and you’re in here day in and day out, making sure you can maintain your sanity and maintain calm is probably not the worst idea. If you really do have a problem client who keeps coming back, and week after week is causing you issues and grief, then you should also feel like you don’t need to hold onto every single customer. It might be that some people actually just have a better experience elsewhere, and communicating that is likewise totally fine.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I think if this is a serious problem you’re having with one person, then that’s a point where you can be like, “Alright, you need to, I’m sorry. You just can’t come here anymore.”

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: But if you’re asking more generally, like hey, if someone misses their appointment every once in a while, someone makes up some excuse that totally sounds like a lie, I usually lean on just kind of being cool about it, and not trying to bring down the fist of justice on them or anything.

Graham: Yeah, we sort of have an unstated publicly three strike policy, and even then we don’t enforce it super strongly. What we tell people is that we have a cancellation policy, and then it’s 24 hours you should cancel in advance of your appointment. If they miss their appointment and then call in later or something and just say, “Hey, I totally realized I missed my appointment.” We’ll be like, “Okay, well just this once we’ll let it slide.” We don’t tell them that also the second time we’ll probably let it slide, and maybe even the third time, but from the outside it doesn’t look like we’re gonna be lenient at all.

It kind of gives us these three extra steps where we’re like, “Okay, well you messed up once. All right, well the second time though, just don’t do it. A third time, all right, we’re charging your credit card for half of your appointment,” or something like that. It’s definitely gradual lead ins, and expressing your own desires I think also goes a long way, as opposed to just immediately hopping to a strict penalty for someone coming in.

Ashkahn: It’s good. It’s an important reminder to not punish everybody because a few people are kind of abusing your system. You can still be cool to everyone by default, and only deal with issues with individual people as they come up rather than adopting a strict policy for everybody.

Graham: Just because Ashkahn takes five bags of popcorn from the hardware store popcorn machine when we go in there doesn’t mean they should stop having popcorn for all of their other guests.

Ashkahn: They should definitely not stop having popcorn.

Graham: Great, good?

Ashkahn: I guess, yeah. Also, physically hurting your customers is probably gonna get you into trouble, so you probably don’t wanna resort to that physical violence. Feel like that should be stated.

Graham: Yeah, but even telling them to kick rocks, from a purely legal perspective, if they go kick a rock that’s too big and stub their toe, you can be liable for that.

Ashkahn: Say professional advice told me I should go kick a rock. Yeah, that’s good. I feel like that answered that.

Graham: Yeah, I do too.

Ashkahn: All right. If you guys have other questions, you can go to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast.

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