How to Respond to Unhappy Customers

Want to ruin your day? Take a phone call from an angry client who has a bone to pick with you. Or read through a bunch of negative reviews left about your business online.

Getting unhappy feedback on your business is one of the toughest parts of running it because:

We pour our hearts and souls into running our small business. When someone is unsatisfied, it feels like a personal attack on us.

This is not true, however, and it is important to make the distinction when you’re trying to navigate how to deal with someone who had a less-than-stellar experience with your business.

First things first, we need to put our complaints into perspective.

When someone complains to you, they are signalling that they need help. Remember this:

If someone truly doesn’t care about your business after a negative experience, they will not waste their time letting you know.

Only in rare circumstances do you have someone so upset that they want to make it known, and nothing can fix it. But then there’s probably more going on beneath the surface (we’ll circle back to that).

So, if we’ve established that your upset customer wants help, it frames the complaint in an entirely different way. The goal of this conversation now becomes, “How do I rectify the situation?” instead of, “How do I defend myself against this attack?”

Below are the general principles I employ, and I advise all my clients to employ, when dealing with upset customers.

1. Allow them to vent

Yep. This part sucks. But let your customer talk, say everything they need to say, and eventually stop. When there’s a small silence, wait a little longer. They will generally start talking again. Take all of their hurt and frustration and just wear it for a minute.

By the time they have exhausted themselves, I guarantee you they will be at least 1% (if not more) closer to being receptive to your response. But hurt people cannot burden the idea of a response until they’ve offloaded their hurt.

Do not cut people off. Do not cherry-pick their replies. Let them do the talking, first and foremost.

2. Apologize for their bad experience

Yep! You read that right. In any circumstance, whether or not you did anything wrong, apologize that your client is having a bad experience. Sometimes, even just acknowledging, “Hey, I see you’re upset. I don’t like seeing you upset. I am sorry that you’re upset.” is enough to talk people off a ledge.

If your client vented about something that was legitimately your fault (say you’re a restaurant who screwed up someone’s order), own it. Explain how it was a shared mistake if you need to, but take responsibility for where you screwed up.

When you apologize for someone’s bad experience, it’s important to note that you are not agreeing with anything they’re saying. You are simply acknowledging their hurt.

It’s important that you don’t take responsibility for things that aren’t your fault if you want to reach an amicable conclusion. If your goal is just to end the confrontation as fast as possible, sure: apologize for everything.

By opening your response with a few sorries, you orient your client towards forgiveness. Why? When you were a kid and you and your brother got into a fight, what did your mom teach you? To say, “Sorry” and “It’s ok.” We carry this instinct as adults. So if you want to get your client closer to being happy again, sprinkle a few sincere sorries into your opening remarks.

3. Identify the cause of the problem

Someone got the wrong dinner dish at a restaurant. Who’s to blame? The customer who wasn’t specific about what they wanted, or the waiter who made his best guess and got it wrong?

Well, probably both. But while the customer is complaining, “I got the wrong plate,” you acknowledge, “So sorry. We must have miscommunicated about what plate you wanted.” In that phrase, you are re-tracing your steps about what went wrong, and 99% of the time, it’s a miscommunication that is a shared responsibility.

Creating a timeline of the event allows you both to objectively identify what happened.

The more complex your client’s complaint is, the bigger the timeline you’ll have to trace. But don’t give up on doing that just because it’ll take a while to get to the bottom of it.

4. Respond to specific complaints

Say that the dinner dish your customer got was wrong in a few ways. “First, I asked for no pickles. Second, the bun is burnt to a crisp. Third, you’re missing the bacon. Fourth, my fries are cold.”

Acknowledge as many of the specific issues as you can when responding.

• “Sorry that you got pickles. I wrote it down but we in the kitchen we clearly got it wrong.”

• “Sorry the bun is burnt to a crisp. Our new toaster is arriving next week and our current one is giving us problems.”

• “Sorry we forgot the bacon. I’m guessing we in the kitchen mis-heard that you wanted bacon and didn’t want pickles.”

• “Sorry your fries are now cold. They were fresh when we served them, but must’ve gotten cold in the mean time.”

It’s important that you don’t make excuses, but that you acknowledged this happened and are just trying to explain how. Some customers don’t like this, so know your audience. If you get push back, either try to calmly restate, “I’m not trying to make excuses, I am trying to provide an explanation”, or simply abandon the idea altogether. Some customers don’t care. Let it go if so.

But, if nothing else, acknowledge, “I’m sorry the pickles, bacon, bun, and fries in your order were botched.” Whether or not it was your fault.

5. Offer suggestions on how to fix the problem

Depending on your business, here are a few ways you can attempt to remedy the situation:

• Offer a refund or exchange on the item

• Offer a discount on the total invoice

• Offer a free something to accompany the service

• Offer a free or discounted something next time

If you give your customer multiple options and they do not go for any of them, simply ask, “What would you like me to do?” and listen to what they ask.

If their request is unreasonable (it likely is), either offer an alternative or simply say, “I cannot do that.” Read the section below on Company Policy if you want an easy fall-back.

6. Bend the rules a little

Like it or not, your angry customer is probably going to “get away with it” at least a little bit if you want to come to a happy resolution.

As a business owner, you forfeit the right to complete justice. You will often lose, at least in part, and you must become comfortable with this if you are to survive.

Your customer leaves you a profanity-laden response on social media about your terrible business? You do not have the right to respond in the same way if you want to maintain your business. Accept this. Learn to bite your tongue. Learn to speak through your teeth. It is an essential skill as a business owner.

But understand the good that comes out of bending the rules:

When you bend the rules for a customer, you demonstrate, objectively, that you are willing to go above-and-beyond. Even if the client remains unhappy, new clients will recognize your integrity.

This is wildly true in my experience. Even if this customer never comes around to forgiving you, you now have objective proof that you tried your best, and far beyond what any person would deem reasonable. This is a powerful tool in your arsenal against this complaint ever coming back to hurt you in the long run.

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And those are the major ways to deal with an unhappy customer. This counts whether your customer is irate on the phone, you’re responding to a negative email, a bad public review, or a sour social media comment. The principles remain the same.

A few more quick tips on how to handle these situations:

1. Solve things privately

If you’ve got a very public negative review you want to be forgotten as quickly as possible, ask the customer to phone you or direct message you instead. You have the authority to enforce the way in which you handle complaints. Do not feel pressured to deal with things in the arena the customer started the dispute in.

Additionally, the vast majority of people will not follow through with this. You are the good guy for offering to deal with this situation if the client can use the appropriate channels (you will), but you mitigate the risk because many never will.

2. Be respectful, always. No exceptions

Want to turn your bad day into a bad career (or no career)? React emotionally (and very publicly) to criticism. Like it or not, we live in a fairly prevalent cancel culture that can end your business literally overnight. Be calm and respectful in all things, no matter how rude someone is in response. An objective third party will make note of how each of you responds just as much as they will what you respond.

3. Claim Company Policy

If your customer, at the very least, feels as though you are treating them the same way you would treat anyone else in the same situation, it can help take the edge off. Now, some people are only looking for special treatment, and it’s up to you about whether you should provide it. In some circumstances, it helps to “bend the rules” a little in order to redeem the situation. But even if you’re a company of 1, and you claim “Company Policy is to ____” when something happens, it usually brings your customer down a little. NOTE that I am not advocating for lying to your customer. You should always be fair and respectful in all things to all customers. But it is ok if you are inventing the company policy as you go along, and opting not to share that part with your particular customer.

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Being a business owner is tough! Having unhappy clients can absolutely ruin your day (it’s ruined a few of mine this month!). But it doesn’t always have to be this way.

Lastly, there are 2 really, really important things to keep in mind about all of this.

1. Most of the time, it’s nothing personal

We equate an attack on our business as an attack on us, because to us, our business is us. Most customers don’t see it this way, and are often just mad at the situation. If you can remove your personal hurt from the equation, you have a much, much higher likelihood of actually solving your issue.

Remember that most customers do not want to see you personally fail (there are exceptions to every rule), and it can help you navigate to the other side with a much more clear mind.

2. You cannot be all things to all people

You will upset some people. You will permanently lose their business. They may tell their friends. You may find situations that are so damaged, they are irredeemable. It is important to let these go when you come across them. Even if you are 100% at fault (which you will be from time to time).

Think it over. Process it. Learn your lesson, and move on.

Not every customer will be fixable. But that isn’t your problem.

You can only do so much to make an unhappy customer happy once again. After that, the ball is in their court. Don’t hold yourself accountable for what they choose to do with it.