PPB January 2018

undesirable. For example, this customer does not recognize the additional information in a catalog or order acknowledgement. • The opportunist is the one who takes advantage of the situational opportunity to engage in conduct such as stealing from a booth at a trade show. Their entire motivation is to exploit the situation for their own personal gain. • The “returnaholic” is always looking for a discount to keep merchandise that they regard as defective. Regardless of the label, customer misbehavior costs every organization the two most valuable resources they have: time and money. Time must be spent dealing with these unprofitable customers, and in many cases businesses make the decision to refund their money in order to placate them and allow their employees to move on. In general, misbehaving customers use five justifications for their behavior. They are: in denial of responsibility (“it’s not my fault”), denial of injury (“I didn’t do any harm”), denial of a victim (“nobody got hurt”), combination of the condemners (“you’ve done worse”) and appeal to higher loyalties (“your rules do not apply to me”). Customers who engage in these behaviors justify their actions both before and after they misbehave. What Causes Customer Misbehavior? There are a number of identified customer traits such as demographic characteristics, psychological characteristics and social/community elements that can be indicators of behavioral problems. One prominent psychological driver has been defined as customer retaliation, where the person is driven to “get even” because of dissatisfying customer service encounters. They have a perceived injustice state of mind and are looking to restore equity in their engagement with customer service personnel. Personal and environmental factors, while not obvious to management, can also trigger customer misbehavior. One internal motivator for stealing at a trade show is the concept of personal gain. This involves a rational choice between the economic gain and the perceived risk. This can be evaluated as a “risk versus reward” or “risk versus punishment” scenario in the mind of the customer. Last, customers who have an inflated belief in their own authority may assume they have control over all situations, and they can justify their actions with both their power presumption and the personal perception of their status in social and business environments. A Few Strategies To Consider Managers can use a number of strategies to reduce customer misbehavior. The first involves training front-line employees on possible triggers, what to look for when working with customers and engagement techniques to diffuse potential conflicts before they become problems. An additional part of this training might be to go beyond identifying customer traits to identify actual examples of customer misbehavior and how they were handled. Managers should also look at the extrinsic factors in trying to understand the motivation of difficult customers. Take an outside look at the company operation and organization. Do phones ring for an excessively long period of time before they are answered? How long is it before emails are answered? These are factors that can create discord in the mind of the customer, setting them up to engage in verbal abuse when they finally do get to a front-line employee. If the situation is dire, a final option is to fire customers who engage in abusive or disruptive behavior. There are a number of analysis-based strategies you can use to determine which customers should be let go. On the qualitative side, keep count of the number of complaints and grievances filed by employees against a particular customer or group of customers. Upon analysis, you may determine that these customers disrupt the business and may be causing psychological harm to the employees. The antics from these customers may also be keeping employees from effectively serving other customers as well. How Does This Affect Your Business? The issues facing businesses are two fold. The first is that accounting systems are not set up to track qualitative costs (impact on employees’ productivity and morale), but they can do a good job of tracking quantitative costs, such Managers should also look at the extrinsic factors in trying to understand the motivation of customers who engage in misbehavior. Take an outside look at the company operation and organization. | JANUARY 2018 | 23 INNOVATE