Over the past three years, many people have contacted me in relation to complaints they are having with organisations of substantial size to help them get it resolved. In the past 3 years I have helped people with everything from the department of work and pensions, to banks, to utility providers and other companies. So far I have a perfect score - over 160 complaints on different matters and as of yet I have not failed to get a resolution. I should have been a lawyer. To the outsider my methodology seems aggressive but there is method to my madness in the way I deal with companies. Sometimes I have to walk a tightrope during a call or when writing a letter but over time I have developed my own technique to deal with troublesome companies. A few people have asked how I do it in many cases, so! over the coming weeks I am going to begin putting up tips to deal with serious complaints and handle the handlers. Be advised though, these tactics are not your typical tactics, many will disagree with my methods but the fact is that they work. Infact many of the methodologies are specifically gauged to breaking the methods used by companies to get the resolution they want. I will start with the 5 rules I always apply to every single engagement: Rule 1: The pen is mightier than your vocal chords: You should always have a pen and paper handy on any call. The reason for this is simple - to make notes. The first words out of your mouth whenever you speak to someone new is : For the purpose of the recording, please state your name and department along with any unique identifier that I may use to reference this call. When they come back with that information you should always write it down and the time you begun speaking to them. Rule 2: Watch the watcher. I always have a recorder plugged into the phone line. You can get a cable and a cheap dictaphone from ebay that will do the job nicely. Now notice what I did in rule one. I stipulated to the person for the purposes of the recording - if they query which recording you say - the one that is no doubt being recorded for training purposes - notice the language I just used? It was deliberately evasive but enough to make the person on the other end of the phone believe I was referring to the call at the companies end. No! Indeed I was talking about the recording I was making. The one thing I should tell you is that it is an offence for an organisation to record calls without notifying the individual before they do it - however there is no law in the reverse. As an individual you do not need to extend the same courtesy to an organisation. That being said - the evasive language above is enough to satisfy that requirement as a courtesy. You have asked them to state their info for the recording and you have said it is for training purposes - the fact that they assume it is their organisations recording is their fault - you cannot be held responsible for their misinterpretation of your words. Rule 3: Never be abusive - it is a criminal offence to be abusive in any way to any member of staff. You can go to prison for it. So the trick on any call is to ensure that you are never construed in a manner which could b directly abusive or offensive to the individual on the end of the phone. That being said - this particular law is often abused by large scale organisations to their own advantage. Telephone based staff learn in the first week that if they deliberately get an obtuse customer angry to the point of abuse they can warn them and then terminate the call. That leaves you out in the cold. There is however a way to pull the rug out from underneath any complaint handler that intends to use that tactic. I do it at the start of the call. The first thing you do is use their name 3 times in this one sentence - firstly it spooks them, makes you look a bit mental without actually being mental - it puts them on the back foot. So start your call (after getting their details like this (assume the person on the phone is called mary) OK mary, just before we continue with the call there are a few things I need to make very clear from the get go Mary and I would appreciate it if you would kindly let me tell you what they are. (their customer service training will kick in and they will always let you say your piece at the start of the call - they may not extend that courtesy later but there are reasons for that) Firstly Mary, Do not call me Mr. Keatings, my fathers name is Mr and I do not like the use of formal names so I would appreciate it if you would just call me Martin. (this does too things - firstly, the reason they refer to you as Mr & Mrs or Miss etc is not for professionalism - it is to create detachment, to stop the person on the phone bonding with the customer. By forcing them to use your first name they are forced to recognise you as a person not a number. Secondly it gives you an excuse throughout the call to break their concentration by saying - i thought I asked you not to call me Mr. Keatings. This is very important as you will find out later.) Secondly mary, understand clearly that my beef is not with you personally - it is with your organisation and with the general incompetence of your colleagues in dealing with this matter. By the end of this call you are probably going to go off and think that I am arrogant and obnoxious. I am aware that under the communications act that it is an offense to be abusive to any member of staff in any organisation which is why I am making it clear, for and on the record that my statements and comments to you are not directed at you personally. I will also say that my demeanor is not intended to be offensive to you and while you may construe it as such being that i am going to be direct and abbrasive during this call, you need to understand that I am only doing it to ensure an expedient conclusion and indeed ensure that we both know exactly where we both stand, that we are both under no illusions or misconceptions on each others standpoints by the end of this call ok? (at this point you must allow mary to say yes that she understands. why? well you have delivered re-assurance that it is not directed at her personally. This gives you a limited shield during the call as you speak abruptly - if she then tries to say it you are being rude or abusive to her personally you can say - I refer to the second point I made at the start of this call - my comments are not directed at you personally they are directed at your organisation - please do not make the unfortunate mistake of confusing the two) Once she confirms yes - you launch into point three. OK Mary! Now I know that you are trained in a very specific way mary. That you have been trained to try and handle the emotions of the customer by handling the call using words like i understand and i appreciate what you are saying - your company has probably labelled this as empathising with the company when they trained you and you may be under that mistaken belief that it is exactly what you are doing but in reality it is a bit of a cheap trick to fain concern for the customers predicament. I need you to be very clear on this Mary, saying such things to myself with only exacerbate my feeling of resentment for the bank and its employees and will only make me angrier. As such I am asking you not to use such statements but instead be direct, open and right to the point with me. If you need to be blunt to make a point then by all means be blunt, I do not take it to be derogatory to me, instead it will score you brownie points for acknowledging my wish to bring this complaint to a swift resolution. do you understand. (wait for a response of yes or no) (this is important for one reason - it cuts out the bullshit that complaint handlers are taught to put you through on a call while at the same time throwing the agent into a bit of disarray - understand that while they are trained to be free flowing in a call using conversation they are also tightly trained to follow specific guidlines on handling you. This throws them straight on the defensive because they no longer have the crutch that is their call handling guidlines to follow. You also need to know that in larger organisations like banks and massive contact centres, agents are actually tested. Their calls are listened to and graded on how they handle the call and whether they followed the standard guidlines. This immediately puts doubt in their mind for the rest of the call a bit like this oh shit! If my boss listens to this call as part of my checks then I havent followed call handling guidlines - they will keep trying to go back to that crutch throughout the call through fear of their boss finding out that they werent following the normal call flow. You can exert a certain ammount of pressure later on if the member of staff becomes aggressive towards you by advising them that you are going to have their supervisor pull the call - of course you also have the tape you are making as well - which you never every tell them about unless you have nowhere else to go in a call - that is the proverbial bombshell) Rule 4: Swear words can be a useful tool. The trick with any swear word is not to actually swear. We all know the word f**king which is a personal favourite of mine. You will find that the higher you go in the organisation, the less prepared the member of staff is. This is partly due to managers not taking calls throughout the day and often for years because they moved from the floor to management. You will also find that a lot of managers move straight into managers positions without first being on the floor. You will often find a good indicator of this is if they use their staff as cannon fodder - i.e. you need to request them to come on the phone 3 or 4 times or you genuinely hear fear in the voice of the agent you are speaking to when you ask to be passed to a manager. This is because managers have a tendancy to substitute call handling skills with passive aggressive behaviour which typically leads to two things - they try every trick in the book to force a customer to speak to the agent rather than to them because honestly they cannot handle the stress of speaking to customers. It also leads to another phenomenon that I call pedestal behaviour. Give a person a small amount of authority and it goes to their head and they try to use it as a bludgeon. Subsequently you can use this to your advantage in a call. The first trick is to actually get them annoyed - you do not face a 40 stone person in a boxing ring by standing still and trying to hit them back. That is how you get pummelled - the trick is for a smaller person, to move around and use short jabs but always moving. The same is true when dealing with management (and if you think that is bullshit - it works - just ask the 4 ceos I have pasted in the last year). The trick is always to keep the conversation changing and evolving, never giving the manager a chance to keep up with what you are saying. You can do this by slapping them with legislation (the more obscure the better) that they have to look up. By going off on a tangent to other subjects and before they get a chance to realise you are off on one, you return back to the original subject. Either way keep the conversation moving and when you start to hear them getting frustrated you drop a swear word (but not actually a swear word - more like its non sweary variation) - rather than saying this is a fuc*ing joke! you say this is a frigging joke! but you say it so fast they think you said the first one. Understand that it is a basic human response to want to get away from tense situations and if you aggrivate a manager by not allowing them to keep up you create a situation where their aggressive mindset actively seeks out ways to get you off the call - usually by termination. If you drop a bombshell like friggin but make it so fast that they think you actually swore (when you didnt) - the first thing that they will do is go into call termination mode. The first procedure in this is to give you a warning, then they terminate the call. Now! What do you think will happen at this point - you got it! The manager is going to say words very similar to this Excuse me? If you continue to swear I am going to terminate this call! At this point - knowing that you did not actually swear you have the right of challenge. This person has just directly accused you of doing something that you actually didnt do. You immediately turn to them and say I BEG YOUR PARDON! to which they will normally (in about 86% of cases) repeat the warning they just gave. At this point you ask them straight what exactly do you think i did? They will of course tell you that you swore. At this point you tell the person straight actually I think you will find I didnt actually swear - as I stipulated to you at the start of the call - it is an offense to intentionally engage in a communication which can be construed as abusive or vulgar - I think you will find what I actually said was the word friggin which is not actually and never has been a swear word. The very fact that you believe it to be a totally different word simply highlights the fact that you are not actually giving this call your due care and attention. If you believe me to have said something different then I categorically suggest you pull the tape and indeed review what I said but that will only serve to prove my point and make you look like a complete numpty. As a manager you are tasked with ensuring that your engagements with customers are based on facts and accurate - the very fact you have just accused me of something that I did not actually do does not lend weight to that argument - now I would suggest you apologise immediately to me for the false accusation and we will say no more about it or I can write to your complaints department, have them pull this call log and ask them to discipline you for accusing a customer of doing something that they did not do. 9 times out of 10 you get the apology there and then but that is not the aim of this particular tactic. The aim of the tactic (albeit dirty) is to break the back of a managers passive aggressive attitude and lackadaisical method of sleep walking through a call - treating you as just another moaning customer. What you have just done is make their ass twitch. They are now alert, awake, listening to the call fully and indeed under no illusion that you will stand for none of their normal bullshit. It also means that you have created circumstances in which later on in the call you can make them doubt if what they have heard or said themselves is actually what they thought it was. Which can be very useful. What you are aiming for ultimately is to get clear of the contact centre, not by getting terminated but by making the manager so peaved, worried and irritated that they urgently want to offload your call but know they cant just hangup because you have put them in a circumstance where ultimately it could boot them in the teeth by way of a complaint. It is a nasty tactic but ultimately you shouldnt have to use it because companies and indeed staff should be willing to transfer you to someone that can help. Unfortunately in the high stress world we find ourselves in - it is not uncommon for agents to speak to 10 or 20 abusive callers in one shift. As such companies have deliberately created a situation to use agents as cannon fodder to prevent you getting through to higher levels. There was a time where all a person needed to do was shout and they would go straight to high level complaints then someone realised this was the case and suddenly every person started shouting at every little complaint forcing companies into a situation of giving shitty customer service in order to weed out the worst complaints to get them through to high level complaints - as such you need to stand out in such a way where managers actively want to get rid of you as soon as possible and send you up the line. This tactic works well. Rule number 5: Never bring a knife to a gun fight. It it imperative that you research before you go on the call. Dig up enough half baked laws and procedures to use as the proverbial battering ram - in particular laws which have very big fines associated with them are nice to wave around. You are going to need them. It is also a favourite tactic of mine to find obscure laws which have not been used for years but are still valid - mainly because your normal advisor does no know about them. More to come.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 14:05:19 +0000
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