Aggro customers - still rising
“The risk is real and the consequence is greater”
It’s not you
The tide continues to rise in the space of aggressive customer situations in a wide range of industries - from retail to corporate settings. So what’s changed.
Well chances are it’s not you. You are certainly a factor in the outcome but you are not necessarily the cause. In fact there remains a high likelihood that you aren’t.
Not only are we seeing an increase in racial and verbal abuse, but also in physical assaults. Customers and clients who, it is acknowledged may have a lot of stress in their lives are throwing down in the face of staff just doing their job.
“Five years ago there is no way we would have tolerated being told, fuck off you silly bitch and get me someone who knows what they’re fucken doing, but now it seems to be more normal than not”
Slowly the line has been moved, aggressive and abusive behaviour seems to be more tolerated. People have become more emboldened, and there seems to be little in the way of consequence. Mix all of that together and it tells me that this society and community problem isn’t going away - its going to continue to increase.
Nothing changes unless you change
The challenge for all organisations dealing with this problem is to change - change in how you deal with it.
Acknowledge the problem of aggressive customers is real and have robust training and procedures in place to deal with it.
The training doesn’t need to be exhaustive. Get everyone aligned and train to a team response. Have little and often team conversations on how to deal with different escalating situations.
The “countdown” stabbing critical incidents are most certainly going to happen again. Not necessarily in a supermarket, but absolutely for sure, some aggrieved, disturbed, emotionally charged person is going to reach into a bag, a back pocket and pull out a knife and stab an employee.
It is not a big shift from someone kicking off verbally, to escalating to violence. It’s real and its occurring with a greater frequency than people may think.
Training your people is certainly a big part of the solution in building your team resilience and in preparing for getting to grips with difficult customer situations.
QRisk Situational Awareness Training
Paul Walsh is a partner at QRisk Training. With a vision of “a safer world, one client at a time”. QRisk are specialists in lifting the capability and capacity of people and organisations – keeping people safe through onsite and online interactive training and the wider good drills programmes. He is also a keynote speaker around people safety security with a focus on situational awareness training, personal accountability and responsibility.
Check out online course on getting to grips with difficult customers - it could be the solution you are after.