Define your Line
“Define your line - then name it to tame it”
Take control of those abusive and aggressive customer situations
Have you noticed the incredible number of retail and customer facing service industries that have those sign’s up.
The signs that say abusive and aggressive customer behaviour will not be tolerated. Chances are you may well have them up in your place.
Not only are we seeing an increase verbal abuse, but also in physical aggression.
Customers who, it is acknowledged may have a lot of stress in their lives are throwing down abuse and aggression with common frequency.
“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……”
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.
Define your Line
Contact us on how running a “Define your Line” session might well be a great place to start. Feedback from our Situational Awareness courses says its one of the best modules of the course.
Define your line is all about getting everyone on the same page to what is and what isn’t abuse and importantly the tactics and words to deal with it.
If you don’t call it out - then you enable it.
If you have one those signs up - but don’t actually have a practiced response then you enable it.
Run a define your line session with QRisk and you will be much better placed to respond. It’s a great interactive and even fun way to learn and start to put in place good tactics and build resilience in this space.
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.