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AAGGHH – CONFLICT! by Matthew Hill

Conflict Reversal, Remediation, and Resolution

Conflict Reversal – 12 ½ Ideas that will help you get over the drama to get on with the business.

#conflict #mediation #dispute #argument #anger, #complaint #handling #customer #client #unhappy #service #training #coach #tips #insights #resolve #remediation #reverse #settle #agreement #happiness #culture 

Upset customer

We all know the feeling. You are going along, doing the very best you can in your business, and suddenly you experience an emotionally violent communication from somebody you thought you did an OK job for. They are agitated, reeling off all the faults they experienced in your service, and concluding that you are a disgrace.

Now, logically you know that you’re not that awful, but you also know, something probably has gone wrong. In this piece, we offer 12 ½ concepts that will get you well on the way to reversing the perceived wrong, stabilising the customer or client, and helping you to improve your business processes, enabling you to get back to work and carry on at full steam pace (though now with those mindful improvements incorporated).

1. Rambling mess to succinct summary – I am a working mediator and arbitrator, and I recommend this first method as the number one conversion tool to move from panic and outrage, through rational discussion, to heart-calming resolution in a reasonable amount of time. My world record for volume of complaint was 53 handwritten A4 pages of drama. I applied this method looking to just pick out the relevant elements that formed the case. I ended up with a half page summary, containing 6 reasonable points!

By putting aside 97% of the volume, I transformed the case from impossible to deal with (the other side may go through the case once, but they certainly won’t read the vast document again after that) focusing the minds of the plaintiff, the complainer, so that they could express their case in a useful, pragmatic, and effective way.

Anybody can cope with and revisit a 1/2 page of relevant information, without feeling overwhelmed. This process will reduce the other side’s reluctance to tackle the conflict and aid engagement with less tension, leading to better odds of resolution.

2. Random thoughts to timeline – The second method overlaps with the first and puts beginning, middle and end elements in start, middle and finishing order. You would not be surprised to know that most people, when recalling some emotional outrage, are not rational, and logical, and do not automatically edit their diatribe, putting it into a neat and accurate timeline. 

When applying this method recently, we found that by taking out one person’s involved in the complaint and the claimant’s conversation with that person, and using the timeline method, the cleaned story told in chronological order revealed that NOTHING really happened at all, and it was all about a style difference between this person, the one that we had isolated and set aside from the story. It was one of the neatest and most surgical conflict reduction moments I have experienced, and it relied simply on taking an emotional story and rearranging it in chronological order.

3. Isolate the cause – Again overlapping with the top two methods, angry people blend character’s narratives, highlight symptoms, and express their own feelings and reactions. And they are prone to adding in bits, and chunks of their own opinion. Not much of this helps in generating forward momentum, moving a case towards the building of a shared and constructive understanding and so reaching peace.

If you become Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass, you can take the individual elements of input and see them distinctly as a symptom, a sign, or a reaction. What would a detective do here? They would treat these elementary units as clues and then go looking for the cause or the root cause. When we get the two groups to agree on the root cause, that will often move the parties right along and have them no longer being in dispute. By doing this we go from two parties fighting, to different human beings agreeing on at least the cause of a specific issue. Just holding in your mind that most things communicated in a conflict are reactions to symptoms, and that the assignment of blame is just a way of processing drama, we can choose, as intelligent adults, to take a beat and dissociate from all of this for a second, as emoting over  symptoms does not represent a scientific attempt to find out what actually happened.

4. No one is evil – I have lost count of the times that people have said the other party is evil, criminal, or neuro atypical. This is (mostly) not the case. Investigating dozens of cases, I have yet to come across anyone who had an evil intention when providing a product or service to a customer. Never.

Now it might happen one day, and I’m always open to the possibility, but I believe that 99% of people offering services to the public, do so with an open heart and come from a good place.

What is it that causes conflict then? – HUMAN ERROR – most of the time it is a silly, rushed action by a stressed employee – they wrote down the telephone number or e-mail incorrectly, they forgot to log the information on the computer, or they didn’t put the date in their diary – odd, simple, human, less than one-minute, omissions – nothing evil there. Of course, the consequences can be a disaster. Let us separate the tiny human error from the plaintiff’s reaction or overreaction to the consequences. The case is also about the error, not just the consequence.

5. Details – some character types believe that detail, context, peripheral story, setting and arbitrary random side facts, lend credibility and authenticity to their complaint. NOT ALWAYS.

Detail does not make a case. For years the financial prosecutors of high-tech bank fraud failed to secure any major convictions – because they went via the detail route. A six-month case in the High Court has a major bottleneck and point of weakness – the 12 very ordinary people, who were not confident enough to get out of jury service. Detail will not work with this jury. They became lost on the afternoon of day one. Justice cannot be served. Detail is not always the way to go.

6. Reality testing – when people complain, like unreliable witnesses, they recall and retell from a film playing in the cinema of their minds. This film is a flexible show that is added to over time. Given enough time, some people will make a Wagner opera out of the simplest thing. In a recent case I had an anxious woman add all sorts of details, I guess because she thought it would make the case more real for me. Of course, it had the opposite effect. When the other side successfully challenged her fabrication, fiction and exaggeration, her credibility went from very high to very low. Not helpful when pursuing a claim.

In the customer service area, there is a crunch question. It comes up rarely and it’s more about the answer then the question. When someone is bent out of shape about an individual service providing person, I may cut through the drama and ask, “Would you want them removed from their job?” There is logic here. This will generate a response and highlight the situational processing that they may not have completed. Nearly all regular human beings, react with shock and immediately say, “No!” It brings home to them the reality, differentiating between the human error sized cause, and the amplified and brutal consequences. No one reasonable will pursue disastrous punishment that would see a family’s bread winner removed from their salaried role for a one-minute slip up.

7. Claim – I am always fascinated by a very specific part of any conflict – the claim. In more formal circumstances this tends to have three specific elements – an apology, action/ remediation, and a request for financial compensation.

There are moral people who wish to change the system and make no money claim. There are “lottery winners” who wish to take the customer for everything they’ve got, and there are some people who can move on, having received the gesture of a sincere apology, written by a senior person, printed out on headed paper, and posted to their house.

Clarifying the wronged person’s claim, can move them along from the middle state of anger, feelings, and drama, to a realisation that something that has started must be completed, so that both parties can focus on the more constructive parts of their lives.

8. Separate the elements – we gave an example of this earlier in this piece when we separated a tricky individual from the timeline. When I go through the history with the plaintiff to clarify a case, I often have to coach them in separating out the elements. They feel that stacking up case details increases the power of their claim. Again, it does not. When we separate out the elements, we end up with one of two realities. Either one person made one human error, or there were multiple human errors, possibly committed by several people. The former is a limited case, and the latter represents a more serious issue for the service or product provider.

9. Hyperbole – It is wonderful to deal with natural storytellers, but when they are complaining customers, their charm and skill in weaving a tale becomes an issue. With gentle probing questions, it should be possible to deflate the balloon of their story, taking it back down to life sized. When we do this, we’re getting closer to the facts, attribution of cause and responsibility, and we are leaping constructively toward resolution.

10. Group hysteria – Above we saw a naturally talented storyteller plumping up the saga to persuade their audience. When we get an outraged family, group of friends, or collection of people who have something strong in common, then they can egg each other on to add layers and details that were not necessarily originally present. And this can be problematic. When an individual brings a case, they are entirely responsible for their side of the story telling. When three or four people are involved, they individually only feel 33% or 25% responsible for the total story. This means they don’t hold themselves totally accountable for being honest! When a group gets together and concocts a version, it will normally be more than 130% of the actual. Again, probing questions can reduce the swelling.

11. The never-ending complaint list – In my experiences of dealing with customer complaints, I see that most human beings are pretty reasonable. One small error will not generate a complaint. Two small errors will probably will not have the customer initiate a complaints procedure. When you get to three or four, small and individually insignificant errors, then all bets are off. The customer and their partner become forensic CSI investigators, revisiting the crime scene to look at absolutely every element of what has happened. The resulting report, when they have taken off their gloves and protective suits, will be a dirty dozen list of problems. Each one, on their own, will not be significant, but, gathered together, they make up the wronged party’s claim. This can shed light on a deeper cultural or endemic issue within the provider.

We can spin this for the provider – they have just received free consultancy, and specific and sometimes detailed feedback on where, when, and how their service provision is not 100%. They can take this factually, and review processes, procedures, and staff training, and move up a level in the consistency, and quality of the service they provide. This flipping of perspective is often enough to move the receiver of the dirty dozen list, from a state of irritation, to one of inspiration and action taking leading to a robust improvement in their processes.

12. Moral Outrage – Representing the opposite of the point above, is the moral outrage case. Here a modest and unconscious human error, will have produced a consequence that either crosses a moral line or a legal one. The moral/ legal case with one strong point, outweighs the shopping list above. We know that a customer is pursuing an ethical or moral case when they don’t ask for money. This is the clue that the case is about something more abstract and important to them. They have been triggered by the attack on one of their deeply held non-negotiable values.

12 ½ . Life narrative – We are all coloured by our past. The theme of this piece has been the isolation of facts, the ordering of events, the de-escalation of feelings, and the removal of added drama, etc.

We experience the complaint as a facet of the narrative of the life of the person complaining. A person who was suffered more downs than ups, more misfortune than fortune, and who is now in a less than happy place, is likely to view the treatment they receive from the provider as unfair, prejudicial, or even containing an element of persecution.

This is a more difficult case to deal with. 

I am not including genuine cases of prejudice and persecution here. Those are real and are dealt with elsewhere.

Keywords that trigger the identification of this phenomena include “disgrace” “disgusted” “Outrageous”.

Here it is impossible for the person initiating the conflict to separate their life narrative from the incident they have just experienced. 

Here the path is clear but tricky to follow. It is about establishing the course of events as being separate, unbiased and in no way personal. If the plaintiff can move some way to becoming detached from being “in” their own story, we will have moved the dial, and can be pleased with any modest resulting outcome.

Conclusion

By processing the raw story, using some of the techniques we’ve outlined above, it should be possible to transform an unwieldy rambling complaint, into a succinct meaty summary, that runs in chronological order, has been stress tested to reduce it down to constituent facts, and where the symptoms have been investigated to uncover and highlight the cause. Where the initial accusation of evil and criminality, have been calmed down to an acknowledgement of a single and small case of human error, that escalated with negative consequences.

With a mindful treatment of the emotions and reactions of the complainant, and the use of the tools at the provider’s disposal – apology, action/ remediation, and compensation, it should be possible to swiftly deal with error-based conflict, learn from custome highlighted mistakes to improve the business, and future proof customer service, process and procedure, so that this drama and distraction doesn’t crop up quite as frequently in the following years.

If we see complaint and negative feedback as an opportunity for systems improvement and trust ourselves to use proven methods when dealing with conflict, complaint and drama, then we can (almost) look forward to the next emotionally charged customer interaction!

I hope you have grabbed value from this piece. Do feel free to like and share with the people in your life who need to read this.

All the best with your next conflict moment.

About the author

Matthew Hill is a CEDR accredited mediator and adjudicator, specialising in commercial complaints. He runs a Management Development Programme working to build awareness and proactivity in newly promoted executives in medium sized businesses.