Rule #33
Never, Ever Argue with a Customer

When I was running the restaurant at a Marriott Hotel back in 1976, there was a regular diner who would complain to me every time she came in. Her tea was too cold. Her soup was too hot. Why didn’t we serve X? Why did we serve Y? The entrée came too quickly. The wine didn’t come quickly enough. At one point, I couldn’t take it anymore and my inner wise guy got the better of me. “Do you lie awake at night thinking up things to complain about when you come in here?” I asked her.

She promptly snapped back. Before I knew it, we were arguing. I told her the tea was quite hot; she insisted it was cold. I said the soup was just the right temperature; she contended that it burned her tongue. Pretty soon the argument got personal. It was no longer about tea and soup; it was about winning and losing. Later, Bud Davis, the general manager, called me into his office and chewed me out. I not only had to apologize to that woman, I had to practically kiss her feet every day from then on. I did as instructed, but inside I was furious, because I felt that she’d won. Then Bud taught me an important lesson: When the customer wins, it’s really the company that has won.

Think about it this way, he told me: Even the most obnoxious customers want to give you their business, and their money is worth exactly the same amount as that of the sweet, kind, gracious customers. So if I wanted to keep taking those customers’ money, I would be well-advised to keep my mouth shut. Lesson learned. I never argued with a customer again. And once I became an executive, I always made sure that no one on my teams ever did so, either. Of course, I had to bite my tongue more than once in my career. But my tongue survived, and the companies I worked for were spared the loss of quite a few customers. As my grandson Jullian reminded me recently, the human tongue is the strongest muscle in the body. When a customer picks an argument, you’d be wise to refrain from flexing that muscle.

From time to time over the years, a customer would complain to me that a frontline employee had been belligerent. When I asked the employee what happened, I’d usually be told that the customer was wrong about the facts, or had been abusive, or was trying to cheat the company. Most of the time, the employee believed it was better to lose a bad customer than appease one. They were surprised when I told them there’s no such thing as a “bad” customer.

I always made sure those employees learned what Bud Davis taught me: Never, ever argue with a customer. Don’t get defensive. Don’t get rude. Don’t get sarcastic. Period. Will some customers try to scam you? Sure. Will some try to take advantage of you and get something for free? No doubt. Do some people have a lousy attitude and an outsize sense of entitlement? Oh, yeah. You bet. But none of that matters, because business is business and profit is profit.

So the louder they get, the quieter you should get. The more agitated they become, the calmer you should become. As the old saying goes, “When you argue with an idiot, there are two idiots.” If you can’t handle a particular situation without losing your cool, walk away and get your manager immediately.

If you are the manager, make sure that your employees know to always be respectful, calm, and in control when dealing with customers, no matter how hard any particular person pushes their buttons. The only emotions they should display to an angry customer are empathy and compassion. The only weapons they should wield are kindness, patience, and competence. Two old maxims apply: (1) The customer is always right; and (2) Grin and bear it. Bear it while the customer vents, then fix whatever triggered the customer’s rage.

When a customer has a tantrum, it is vital not to take it personally. The anger is not about you—the customer doesn’t even know you or care about you—it is about a situation. He’s been disappointed or frustrated. Maybe she feels ripped off. The complaint may be totally unreasonable, and the reaction may be way over the top. Or not. Either way, it’s not about you. It’s about the circumstances. You’re just the available outlet for the customer’s rage. Fix whatever is wrong and you become the hero rather than the target.

Keep this in mind, too: Everyone has problems that you don’t know about. The customer screaming at you may have had the worst day of her life, and what happened at your business was the final straw. Maybe she lost her job. Maybe a loved one died. Maybe she just got a horrible medical diagnosis. Why make her day worse than it already is by drawing her into an argument?

One New Year’s Eve decades ago, at the same Marriott Hotel where Bud Davis read me the riot act, an angry customer demanded to see the manager. That manager was me. The customer was irate because when he and his wife had arrived at the restaurant to ring in the new year, he had been told that there was no record of their reservation. We were completely sold out, and the place was packed. I told him that the hostess was right: every table was booked. His fury escalated to blind rage. He shouted in the crudest of terms that I was an idiot and my employees were losers. I took a deep breath and calmly said I would fix my problem. That’s right; I said my problem, because it was in fact my problem, not his. But he didn’t quite hear me because he was too busy yelling. So I asked firmly but not argumentatively, “Do you want to keep yelling at me, or do you want to let me resolve this issue?” He muttered, “Fix it.” And when I said I would, just like that, he calmed down.

I escorted the couple to the bar and ordered champagne for them, on the house. I even gave them two of those pointy New Year’s Eve hats (it’s hard to throw a tantrum in a funny hat). Then I went to the hotel’s banquet department, found a small cocktail table that would seat two, and squeezed it into a corner of the restaurant. Fifteen minutes later, they were seated at the table with a fresh rose and a candle. And a few hours later when he paid his check, the restaurant had made that many more dollars and secured one more happy customer.

Doesn’t that sound like a far better alternative to telling a belligerent customer to leave? In addition to the obvious gains, there was another benefit: I set a good example for all the other employees. Don’t forget that part of a manager’s responsibility is to model right behavior; if you can’t check your emotions when you deal with customers—or your staff—then you can’t expect anyone else to, either.

Here are some more tips I’ve picked up over the years for dealing with angry customers without returning fire:

Let them vent. Listen to the whole story without interrupting. Sometimes all they want is to be heard.

Take responsibility for the problem. Don’t blame. Don’t explain. Don’t make excuses. Customers don’t really care that you were understaffed, or that the delivery van had an accident, or that your Internet server was down.

Try to come up with a quick, easy solution. If you can’t, ask if you can work on the problem and get back to them in twenty-four or forty-eight hours. In my experience, most angry customers calm down after being treated decently and are more likely to accept a reasonable solution later on than they are in the heat of battle.

Eat humble pie. Even though you should treat the customer as though he is always right, sometimes customers are simply wrong: maybe he misread the agreement form, or wrote down an incorrect date, or doesn’t know the facts. In these cases it would be easy to win the argument, but at what cost? Sometimes it’s better to let it go. Humble pie can taste pretty good when you get to keep a customer instead of losing her forever.

Make it easy to complain. Have a hotline, a service desk, or an e-mail account manned by real people who are trained to resolve complaints. Think of it as preventive medicine: an ounce of complaint today is worth a pound of argument tomorrow.

Remember the final score. When you win an argument with a customer, in reality you’ve both lost.