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Ultimate Guide to Difficult
Conversations
1. Introduction 2. When you don’t know the answer 3. When you have to transfer a customer to someone else 4. When a customer requests a feature or product 5. When a customer asks you for a favor that you cannot do 6. When there’s something wrong with the delivered product 7. When you close the conversation 8. When a customer is angry 9. When a customer is unwilling to pay 10. When a crisis occurs 11. When you have a frequently complaining customer 12. When customers complain on social media 13. When you have legal issues 14. When you have to deliver bad news 15. When you have an abusive customer 16. When customers cross boundaries 17. When the customer speaks a different language 18. When a customer asks a vague question 19. When customers ask when something is going to be available 20. When you or your fellow agents made a mistake 21. When a customer wants to speak with a manager 22. When you can’t resolve the issue right away 23. When you need to let a customer know that it was their mistake 24. When a customer reaches you by mistake 25. When a customer asks how your product is different from others 26. When a customer is worried about how secure your service is 27. When a customer says that they forgot their password 28. When you want to point a customer to your documentation 29. When a customer violated your terms of service 30. When a customer is not tech-savvy 31. When a customer is right, but your policy is not 32. When a customer sounds like a bigot 33. You’ve got this!

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6.

When there’s something wrong
with the delivered product

There’s nothing that feels worse to the customer than depending on something and having it not work as expected. That could be either a physical product that is broken or malfunctioning or a virtual product that has a bug, either known or new. Either way, the customer is expecting your product to work, and instead of doing so, it is causing them trouble and they have had to reach out to you. No good.

This is another email or chat conversation where acknowledging the customer’s strife, aligning with them to let them know that you agree with their opinion, and then assuring them that you’re going to find a resolution is going to be the most valuable response. Something like this should do the trick:

Hi there,

Thanks so much for reaching out about this — I’m sorry to hear that you’re having trouble. It sounds like [your product that is defective for them] might be having some issues. That’s definitely our bad. I, personally, know how much of a bummer it can be to expect something and then have it not work as expected. I’m going to [refund you the money, send a new product, get the bug fixed, etc] right now. I hope that helps, but if it doesn’t please let me know and I’m happy to dig down further.

Thanks!

While this sample email takes a more colloquial tone, you can make it less casual and more formal as suits the needs of the conversation or customer. For example, if the customer seems really angry or uses formal language in their original email, try to match their tone and style with your own.

The important aspects to include in this response are that you let them know that you acknowledge the issue and that it’s on your company to own it, and then what you’re going to do to resolve it. Depending on your product, the resolution may be a few different things. You may need to:

  • Refund money
  • Send a new version of the product
  • Get the engineering team involved to fix a bug
  • Report a product flaw to your product team

Insert whichever of these options works best for you or the use case with the customer into the template above.

← Previous
5.
When a customer asks you
for a favor that you
cannot do
Next Chapter →
7.
When you close
the conversation
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