Even though your supervisors are always telling you to be patient with your customers and not to get upset with them, following suit can sometimes be a major challenge.

Because following an example can be so helpful, we tapped some expertise from Nick Sprague, senior court office assistant, in Monroe County Family Court located in Rochester, NY. Sprague was helping a woman who was upset because her court case was dismissed. The reason that the judge dismissed her case was that she didn’t come to court on the right court date.

The customer started to become hostile when Sprague informed her that her case had been dismissed. She started yelling at Sprague as though he had dismissed the case himself. The customer then demanded to see the judge who dismissed the case. Because seeing the judge right then and there was impossible, she continued yelling to everyone in the room, “This is not right! This is not fair!”

Although Sprague was tempted to tell her that if she didn’t quiet down, he would be forced to call the court deputies, he instead managed to interrupt her for long enough to explain the situation. “Judges usually have no choice but to dismiss a case when the petitioner doesn’t show up,” Sprague politely told the customer. At that point, Sprague focused on what he could do for her instead of focusing on what had already happened.

“I stressed to her the options she had and how easy it would be to get the case back in to court as soon as possible,” Sprague tells Eli. “I quickly gave her a clear path to getting what she wanted. I gave her the paperwork she needed to file, plus a copy of her old papers to refer to, making it easier to fill out the new ones,” he adds.

In Sprague’s experience, his agency has had deputies come to remove angry customers, so “what could have been a nasty situation ended up pretty fine with her re-filing her papers and getting a new court date,” Sprague says. The next time you’re faced with an angry customer, see what you can do to turn her around.

Filed under: Customer Service Corner