Establish the best conditions for conflict resolution
The conflict ladder described above under Conflict with customers is a good tool to help you and your employees to understand and de-escalate conflicts with customers.
You can use the conflict ladder as a common reference to talk about conflicts and prepare employees to manage conflict.
Organisation of work
The risk of conflicts with customers can be linked to the way in which work is organised at the shop. For example, you can prevent queues at the check-out by opening more check-out points, or you can reduce waiting time during peak periods by increasing the number of shop assistants.
Similarly, you can make sure individual employees have more energy to manage customers by having them rotate between servicing customers and doing other work, and by ensuring everyone knows they can call for help from a manager or colleague in critical situations.
Everyone has to know the rules
If every employee knows about the shop rules and policies, conflicts can be more easily prevented and de-escalated.
Employees should know about the shop’s rules and policies for returns, exchanges, complaints, etc. Otherwise, the employees will not be able to communicate clearly with customers in conflict situations. It is also crucial that the employees know their mandate, i.e. that they know whether they can give customers their money back and, in general, when they can make their own decisions and when to call for a manager, for example.
Similarly, it is important that you have talked about what is acceptable to do or say to a customer. For example, can an employee ask a customer to leave the shop? Can employees themselves leave? When is it a good idea to contact a colleague and/or manager? If employees know their mandate, it will be easier for them to deal with the situation, because they know what is acceptable and what is not.
As a manager, you must also make sure that the employees are familiar with the response plan that has been prepared for the shop, and that they know when the plan applies.
Care for your employees
Compliment your employees when they do well.
Conflicts with customers are part of life, and they cannot be completely avoided. The goal is to de-escalate conflicts and resolve them before they grow bigger and become unresolvable.
When an employee manages to de-escalate a conflict, you should recognise this and compliment them. Use examples of situations that went well to enhance the collective understanding of how to successfully manage conflicts with customers.
Not always possible to solve a conflict
There can be many good reasons why an employee does not manage to de-escalate a conflict:
- There was no time to deal with the conflict and reconcile with the customer.
- The employee was unprepared for the situation. Conflict has to do with emotions, and it’s not always possible to act with patience and calm in a stressful situation.
- Perhaps the customer didn’t want to resolve the conflict and was just having a really bad day and was already frustrated and angry before entering the shop. Or perhaps the customer was drunk, confused or in some other way out of sorts and could not be reasoned with.
Follow up if the conflict was not resolved
If one of your employees has been involved in a conflict that was not resolved, the employee may need to process the experience by talking with you, the manager, about what happened.
If you’re helping an employee process an unresolved conflict, you can use the same tools that you use when managing conflicts with customers.
- You can help the employee to understand what happened by being curious and asking the employee how she experienced the situation.
- You should respect and acknowledge the employee’s experience of the situation, even if you don’t agree with it. Make sure that both you and the employee keep to the issue at hand and do not bring other problems into the conversation.
- Avoid becoming personal. For example, don’t imply that the employee is at fault.
When the employee has told her version of the situation and has calmed down, you can start to talk about how the customer might have experienced the situation, and you can give advice about how to approach similar situations differently in the future.
It’s important that you are appreciative and constructive in your feedback. Otherwise the employee will feel misunderstood or will feel that you are blaming them for the conflict, and then the conflict may affect the relationship between you and the employee.
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