Anger is not ‘a thing’ that just happens – though unintentional at times but never out of the blue, there is always a reason for feeling the destructive but yet useful negative emotion. Anger, like any other negative emotion, can suppress one’s rationality. It clouds judgment and blinds the eye to obvious facts that are stark naked, yet begging for attention.

Anger is so powerful that it has commandeered the thinking capacity of intelligent and powerful people, dragging them into a dark pit, with a bottom, far beyond the reach of any lens. It is in this pit that many regain consciousness and become aware of the wrong choices they made – the grave errors that have brought nothing but despair and sink them deeper into the ocean of regrets. When we understand the nature of anger, we are in a better position to manage customers when they demonstrate anger.

An irate customer is often someone who is having a bad day, a customer whose unlikable mood has been shaped by a series of events, with each event building on an exasperating preceding event. These episodes mold the mood of an irate customer, whose anger is closer to climax with every insensitive gesture or inappropriate word spoken. Simply put, an irate customer is a time bomb.

Customers can get angry because a product they paid good money for is serially developing faults not too long after its purchase. They can also get angry because they paid more for a service that a competitor offers at a relatively cheaper rate – feeling they’ve been ripped off. Sometimes, the customer service team has a history of not being helpful. That becomes another flashpoint for an angry customer.

These are just a few reasons why some customers get angry. There is an equally long list, however, of why you should not get angry at angry customers. Here are just a few of them.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right

This is one of those popular and reliable sayings, used during mediations and conflict resolutions, to deescalate rising tensions between two or more parties. 

“Something must be wrong with you,” a visibly angry customer said to an employee who responded by completely ignoring the angry customer, whose anger was becoming very hard for him to control. The employee had raised her voice when defending her decision to not do the customer’s bidding since it was against policy. She stonewalled the angry customer as she attended to other customers. 

She ignored him, as his wife expressed their displeasure, lamenting the poor customer service in the country, which according to her, was “unlike abroad”. It wasn’t long her supervisor came to the scene. Surprisingly, the supervisor encouraged the service officer’s decision, telling her to “just ignore them and do your job”. The supervisor instructed that she abstains from responding to the angry customers about the issue.

I witnessed this drama in a branch office of one of Nigeria’s biggest telecom companies (I choose not to mention the name). I was disappointed. What the customer requested was impossible as it was against the guidelines of the Nigeria Communications Commission, I knew that but it still did not make sense to stonewall an angry person and approach the issue in the manner they did.

What the customer service personnel should have done is, actively listen to the customer’s challenge so the customer will be assured that the service personnel understood her issues and are committed to resolving their case. Generally, people tend to feel better and their anger assuaged when they feel their concerns and grievances have been listened to and taken into account. The supervisor could have walked up to the customer, engage him, and explain why what he wants can’t be done, then offer an alternative. She didn’t do that, however, and their pretense that nothing was happening marveled me.

Customers get angry because they didn’t get what they wanted from a business, and it is the business’s job to apologize and carefully tell them why they can’t get it. It is definitely a better approach than responding with commensurate anger or stonewalling. Two wrongs certainly don’t make a right.

Rage is Anger Fueled By Threats– Imminent Violence

Given how the human brain is wired, our reactions in heated moments are often not rational, but rather emotional except when one has invested a great deal in self-awareness and self-control.

When playing with toys, a kid can be very possessive to the extent of hitting another kid who takes their toy against their will or without asking. According to Denis Sukhodolsky, Ph.D., a psychologist at Yale Medicine Child Study Center, it is not unusual for a child who is below the age of 4 to have tantrums. These tantrums can occur up to nine times a week and can last up to five minutes.

Adults on the other hand who have a more mature brain system also have a hard time managing their anger. In a 2008 report by Mental Health Organization named Boiling Point, a staggering 64% agreed that people are getting angrier, and 32% confirmed there is a family member or close friend who can’t control their anger.

Jacque Lacan, a French psychoanalyst believed people lean to aggression to defend existential threats. Leon F. SeltzerPh.D a clinical psychologist indirectly affirmed this when he wrote that “rage itself seems mostly a more potent or desperate form of anger, created to fend off an even more serious threat to one’s ego or sense of personal safety.” This and a lot more is why being angry at an angry customer can set off a volatile atmosphere that can be catastrophic to a business. 

Instead of getting angry at a customer, tensions should be de-escalated, and if the attending employees can’t handle the issue they should recuse themselves.

When you take the Boiling Point report and the Gallup Emotional Report (both are more than a decade apart) which found that one in every five persons is angry, you will see why it is important businesses increase the frequency of employee training – especially the customer service department.

Customer Feedback is Priceless

In a 2008 survey, 65% of shoppers were more likely to make a complaint than 3 years before. 56% complained about bad customer service, a 17% increase from 11 years before the survey (National Complaints Culture Survey).

When customers are angry, as mentioned in a preceding paragraph it is always for a reason, but when there are outbursts it is because they have been angry for far too long. Most times, outbursts or rage is a compound of all the bad experiences they have and had never complained about. These annoying experiences pile up and get stirred by every bad experience added to the pile. Unfortunately, when it reaches or exceeds a limit, rage happens and such customers can be violent, physically hitting an employee, or be abusive and ominous.

It is important businesses occasionally speak with customers, and get them to give their feedback, if possible, face to face. Nothing beats an in-person conversation. Suggestions or feedback boxes should no longer be enough. Successful businesses go the extra mile. So go the extra mile and have quick candid conversations with your customers.

Such conversations could be monthly or quarterly, but it is important to get customers to voice out their frustrations and grievances and just defuse them. A psychologist, Dolf Zimmerman referred to rage as “a sequence of provocations, each triggering an excitatory reaction that dissipates slowly”. As Zimmerman would find in one of his experiments, it is important to engage an angry person in the early and mid-stages of their anger. Leaving engagement for later will most likely lead to failure due to ‘Cognitive Incapacitation’. 

Daniel Goleman, in his bestseller book Emotional Intelligence, said “Anger can be completely short-circuited if the mitigating information comes before the anger is acted on”, but he went on to stress that “timing matters; the earlier in the anger cycle the more effective”.

Be innovative, speak to your customers before they become enraged, don’t leave it late, lest you encounter ‘double jeopardy’.

Never Make It Personal

More people are getting angry and it can be for social, economic, or political reasons. Thus, when customers get angry it should not be perceived as a personal attack (by employees), but rather businesses should help their employees become adept in self-control, empathy, and communication skills, which are all important skills in managing anger.

Self-awareness just like oxygen sustains life and activates our ability to control our actions. When one becomes self-aware, one can regulate one’s own emotions, choosing to empathize instead of becoming angry; choosing to say “I am sorry” instead of “I don’t think I offended you”; and choosing to be somber or cheerful in order to match customers’ moods.

When employees are constantly trained they acquire knowledge that becomes readily available for the neocortex (thinking brain) to apply in real-life scenarios. How we react to events is shaped by our lifelong knowledge and experience. Thus our thinking brain collects how we have reacted to similar occurrences (experience) in the past, and how we have modified it (with knowledge). 

All these make up a cognitive process. When employees are repeatedly taught how to handle customer outbursts, this knowledge becomes inherent in their cognitive process that can be easily tapped for application, thus producing amazing results.