7 Groups of Difficult Customers Test Every Business

Have you ever noticed that some of your business owner friends get all the bad customers, and yours all seem fairly reasonable? Or is it the other way around? I’m always amazed that, in my role as a business advisor, bad customers somehow seem to gang up on certain businesses. I long ago learned that the customer is not always right, but you can turn most around to be great.

In my experience, turning difficult customers around is more art than science, but it does help to understand all the ways they can be frustrating. I saw some good insights in a new book, “Dealing with Difficult Customers,” by Noah Fleming and Shawn Veltman. These authors are experts on customer service and customer experience, having helped hundreds of companies of all sizes.

I always try to remember that no matter how many businesses I have helped, I am still a customer more often, usually many times a day almost every day of my life. Thus the first step in understanding difficult customers is to put yourself in your customer’s position, and think how often you find yourself in one of the following difficult customer categories:

1. Expecting what was promised but not delivered. This is called the expectation gap. As a business owner, you have to take a hard look, with your customer hat on, at what you promise and imply to your customers in your advertising, marketing materials, and your customer service. A winning strategy is to always under-promise and over-deliver.
2. Unwilling or too cheap to spend for good service. The reality is that a good customer experience today is more important than a premium product. No customers, including yourself, are willing to tolerate multiple bad experiences, just to get the lowest price. For your business to prosper, don’t associate good service only with high-price products.
3. Being unreasonably demanding of others. If you don’t feel like you are getting the proper attention or attitude, do you sometimes become difficult and demanding with business support personnel? On the business side, this translates into hiring customer-facing people with the proper training, motivation, and solutions to defuse difficulties.
4. Learning that your expectations were wrong. The reality is that we all make mistakes, so no customer is always right. Even when customers are wrong, they don’t have to be difficult if you treat them with respect, empathy, and personal consideration. Every business needs processes, but must empower employees to define exceptions.
5. Intentionally ignoring loyalty, despite good service. I think we all believe that loyalty is not an entitlement. Customer loyalty has to be earned through day-in-and-day-out good service, and returned in kind. Make sure your total customer experiences, not just service, are worthy of loyalty, and you won’t find customers walking away.
6. Spending more money there, so expect better service. In reality, every customer’s version of “more money” is different, so as a business, you must demonstrate “better service” than expectations and competitors to everyone opening their wallet. You want every interaction to be positively memorable, so no one has to keep score.
7. Complaining about everything, even the small stuff. If you have already built loyal customers for your business, they are willing to brush off an odd mistake as an anomaly. People usually become difficult due to a real problem, which they amplify by throwing in all the small stuff. Being consistently good is better than being great once in a while.

Of course, we all know people in our life and business who act irrationally difficult, despite our every effort to provide exceptional support. These deserve to be fired as customers or friends, since life and customers are all about building and maintaining win-win relationships. In fact, if you treat your customers as do your best win-win friends, you probably won’t have any bad ones.