Updated: March 16, 2024

The customer pounds his fists on the counter.

He bellows with rage, spittle flying out of his mouth like angry rain. “This is your fault! You screwed up! You need to fix this!”

The customer’s tirade feels like an attack. He means the company when he says “you,” but it feels personal.

“Don’t take it personally,” is awful advice.

That’s the most common tip for serving an upset customer. But it doesn’t work. Taking it personally is a natural reaction.

Here’s what to do instead.

Why don’t take it personally is bad advice

Your defense mechanisms automatically kick in when confronted with a physical or psychological threat. You instinctively fight off the threat or flee it.

This instinct is called the fight or flight response. It helps in many situations.

For example, let’s say you’re accosted by a growling, snarling dog. There’s no time to plan your reaction. You instinctively confront the dog or try to get away.

Customer service is one place where this instinct doesn’t serve us well.

Try to imagine that furious customer. He’s pounding his fists on the counter and yelling. Taking it personally is a natural reaction.

Your instinct is to either confront the furious customer or try to get away.

What triggers the fight or flight response?

An angry or upset customer can trigger your instinctive flight or flight response. Here are a few examples:

Yelling at you
Making derisive comments about you or your company.
Accusing you or your company of wrongdoing.

The infographic below illustrations our physiological reactions to a “fight or flight” situation.

How to overcome the fight or flight response

Recognize that the fight or flight response is a powerful instinct. Pithy advice like “don’t take it personally” isn’t enough to handle it.

I have two suggestions for overcoming this challenge:

Identify your triggers. Try to be aware of what triggers your fight or flight instinct. Recognize the instinct as it starts to happen.
Pause. Catch the instinct before it takes over. Pause and make a better decision.

This short video from my Working with Upset Customers course shows you an example. You’ll see two scenarios from a coffee shop.

Scenario 1 is at 1:25. Here, the coffee shop barista does a poor job controlling his fight or flight response.

Scenario 2 is at 2:56. This time, the barista identifies the fight or flight response kicking in and takes a brief pause.

Recognizing your natural instincts from Working with Upset Customers by Madecraft and Jeff Toister

Training your team to serve upset customers

Serving upset customers is difficult. Your employees need training, coaching, and practice to develop these skills.

Here’s an exercise you can use to train your team on the fight or flight response:

Show your team the recognizing your natural instincts video.
Ask them to identify their own “fight or flight” triggers.
Have your team practice becoming aware of this response while serving customers.

You can use these resources to provide even more training:

Guide: How to deal with difficult customers
Course: Working with Upset Customers

Honing your instincts can help you choose the right path.

Anyone can say they’re good at service.

It’s easy to describe what we would do in a hypothetical situation. What really counts is what we actually do in the moment of truth when we’re serving a customer.

It’s in that moment that customer service is largely instinctive.

Our personalities, training, and experience combine to guide our instinctive behaviors while serving customers. We don’t pause to recall five step acronyms for handling upset customers; we just try to make the person feel better. We don’t stop to ponder the various communication components that enhance our likeability; we attempt to be likeable. We don’t browse through our mental database of hero-worthy actions; we simply seize the moment to go the extra mile.

These instincts serve us well when they guide us in the right direction. They can also be a liability when we instinctively make a wrong turn.

Research from my book, Service Failure, reveals that our instincts often do push us in the wrong direction. Here are a few examples:

Changing instinctive behavior

It’s hard to alter our instincts in the moment when there’s imminent pressure to perform. However, we can influence our instincts before or after experiencing a moment of truth.

An experiential learning model developed by David Kolb and Ronald Fry provides a simple way to hone our customer service instincts.

All of us have experience to draw from. It’s the addition of the three other steps that inspires learning.

Reflect upon what went well and what didn’t in your experience.
Decide what to do differently the next time you encounter a similar situation.
Experiment with your new approach.

This cycle leads back to experience which gives you an opportunity to start the process all over again.

A client recently asked me for some advice on getting their frontline employees to stop saying “No problem” in place of “you’re welcome.” In the midst of discussing this challenge, a member of my client’s management team caught herself reflexively saying “No problem” in response to a co-worker. It was then she realized this was an instinctive response for her too.

Here’s how I used the experiential learning model to advise my client:

Reflect on the reasons you should avoid saying “No problem.”
Decide what you’ll say instead the next time a customer says “Thank you.”
Experiment with your new phrase at the new opportunity.

That’s it. Setting the intention to try something different can help guide our instincts the next time a customer thanks us.

A Note for Leaders

If you are a manager or supervisor, you can use this experiential learning model to help your employees hone their customer service instincts. There’s just one caveat:

Avoid telling employees what to do.

It’s much harder to change instinctive behavior if you just tell people what to do. That’s because telling someone to do something doesn’t require their brain to process the information. You can get much faster results by playing the role of a coach or guide when using this model.

Here’s how: