Why are angry customers on the rise?

To begin, social stress has increased over the last two to three years due to the pandemic and the general life upheaval we’ve all experienced as a result. Many of us carry a hidden or underlying ticking stress bomb. When we reach a certain point of pressure, we could go off at the slightest provocation. I’m sure we can relate to those seasons in our life where we’ve had to be strong and resilient. Perhaps we didn’t even realise how much we had bottled up, until a situation or person inadvertently flicked a switch and we exploded. It can be just as much a shock to us as it is to those around us when this happens.

It’s obvious that this social stress increase is correlated with the dramatic spike in customer abuse in recent years. In particular, the increase in angry customers seems to belong to an aggressive behaviour category we call the expressive. 

The expressive aggressive is an emotional outburst. Think of it like a volcanic eruption, or a phrase we sometimes use, ‘they’ve gone nuclear’. So it’s always overt. It’s an outward aggression with outbursts and rants that seek to attack and shoot down its targets. It can be quite intimidating when someone launches at you in this way; it’s very dramatic and theatrical.

This hasn’t been isolated to a particular industry, but instead has been experienced across the entire service sector, from retail and health to corporate products and services. It’s caused enormous amounts of stress for frontline staff who’ve been inundated with these behaviours as people attempt to access services. None of this reasoning excuses aggression, of course. However, it can certainly help us understand why there’s been such a spike.

How to respond to the expressive aggressive customer type

The good news is the expressive aggressor is an easier customer aggression type to address. Let’s have a look at how we do that.

1. The expressive needs to be heard. As this type is primarily triggered by stress and pent-up emotion, the emotion needs to be released. Trying to redirect the behaviour too early will only end up creating further blow-ups. Instead, focus on helping them feel heard and validated. Listening is like releasing the pressure valve on their anger.
2. Use the Ferber method. This is a popular method for sleep training with children, famously used for comedic purpose in the ‘Meet The Fockers’ movie. It’s essentially based around letting the child cry for permitted amounts of time before giving them reassurance. This is designed to teach them to calm themselves down and fall asleep, or as this method calls it, ‘self-soothe’. Applied to an angry customer, you allow space for them to rant. Then, rather than attempting to control their emotion, seek to understand and ask questions to direct the conversation. This helps them to vent and start to self-soothe. You’re supporting their need to release emotions and get them away from that heightened state and into a calm state.
3. Acknowledge their issue. It’s only when customers move into a calm state that we can direct them positively. Acknowledge their issue and emotion before providing direction or a solution. This communicates to them that they’ve been heard, and they’re more likely to listen to you as a result. Once they’ve reached this state, it’s not uncommon for the expressive to apologise or say something like, “Look, I’m really sorry. I know it’s not your fault. You’re just doing your job.” 

Throughout this process, it’s important to remember they’re not usually aggressive people. It’s a stress response and they are simply having an emotional reaction to a situation.

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As a result, there are some hybrid communication challenges that we need to get ahead of. 

1. Communication across asynchronous teams

As we transition to a hybrid and remote workplace, we become more accustomed to asynchronous working, where teams might work on different days, times, or in different locations. This can impact the organic task communication supporting efficiency and productivity, and compounds for teams working across different hours. For example, when you’re working in a synchronous environment or in-person, you can walk across to someone and chat then and there. You also get the immediate feedback of seeing if they’re occupied in a meeting or a lunch break, so you know not to disturb them and come back later. 

However, in an asynchronous model, particularly one that supports flexible hours, you’ve lost some of that physical feedback. You need to adjust your strategy for success in a hybrid environment. Here are some ideas:

• Create intentional intersection points. In other words, create definite points within the work schedule where holistic team communication takes place, for example, team meetings at set times. This reduces fragmentation by building consistency, thereby providing opportunity for individuals to realign to the big picture often. You can adjust the frequency of these intersection points as needed for your team.
• Utilise availability statuses within digital tools. For example, messaging platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams provide availability icons, work locations, and status messages that display important information at a glance for those wishing to collaborate and communicate asynchronously.

2. Hybrid communication methods

A lack of structured or formal frameworks to support day to day interactions can lead to confusion or communication across too many platforms. People tend to revert to the communication method that is most comfortable for them, which can lead, for example, to an employee sending an SMS where a phone call or video conferencing would better serve the conversation. This in turn can lead to misunderstandings or delayed resolutions. 

In response to this, develop a communication guide or framework. Having a best practice communication checklist like this outlines communication expectations and protocols, the dos and don’ts, and what methods should be used in which scenarios. With a framework like this in place, people are not just thinking conveniently, but they’re thinking about the best way to get their message across. Furthermore, a guideline or checklist on communication methods is helpful for leaders as well, so they can guide the team in these best practices. 

Often, we think communication is intuitive or people should just know what the best communication method is. But this doesn’t acknowledge the wealth of diversity of experience and backgrounds modern teams have. We all know the saying about assuming. Building a communication framework, on the other hand, sets your hybrid team up for success. 

3. Team cohesion in the hybrid workplace

Team cohesion is hugely important in the hybrid workplace. However, the communication fragmentation that happens with both physical and remote workplaces can combine to create double-barrel challenges for hybrid workers when there’s no plan for engagement in empathy building. This can create a team with a much stronger transactional focus. So, it becomes very task-driven, and the relational side starts to suffer, eroding team cohesion over time. It’s not necessarily evident in a short period of time, but over a longer period, it can be a real issue and cause risks in retention, motivation, and trust.

To combat these risks, we need to repurpose the team. Now, what do we mean by that? Well, the great resignation and modern retention challenges relate to employees searching for purpose and belonging. Therefore, providing your team with a fresh sense of purpose and a focused goal for the future creates unity. To take this idea further, what you really need is to repurpose the team as a collective to cultivate a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves. This gives employees a sense of personal meaning and the feeling of making a valuable difference. Without that feeling, employees start to disengage because they don’t feel valued. 

Now, this isn’t always easy to tap into, but good hybrid leaders find ways to engage their team as a collective; to be a part of something greater than they are as an individual.

4. Digital literacy skills in hybrid models

With the greater demand on technology and written skills in hybrid models, it becomes a critical factor for the success of internal and external communications that employees possess strong written and digital literacy skills.

Therefore, we need to assess the current skill competency of the team and identify where those gaps are in the digital literacy area. Once we’ve determined this, we can develop upskilling pathways that support where each team member is at. This isn’t a generic approach; it’s a highly customised individual approach, which is becomes more achievable within a hybrid environment. 

This customised approach may look like providing employees with access to a training workshop, coaching, mentoring, or buddying. This can present more informally, for example, having regular check-ins to support the individual’s skills and to give them suggestions and maybe deal with their frustrations and challenges in getting to the required results.

5. Combating information blind spots 

Information blind spots can cause employee confusion and anxiety through incomplete or missing information. An example of this is when someone is unwittingly left out of the loop on project updates. This, in turn, can cause dropouts, wrong assumptions, or voids of knowledge. In particular, someone who’s been excluded (accidentally or otherwise) may invent reasons for their exclusion, which will normally be more negative than positive. 

The solution to blind spots is to design a customised communication plan. Now, when we design a customised communication plan, it should:

• Identify what the blind spots are. 
• Conduct pre-consultation to determine what the drivers are.
• Map out a proactive response to ensure everyone has the best opportunity of being on the same page. 
• Comprehensively convey the communication plan to employees and ensure they’ll be informed at the necessary level.
• Incorporate a relational inclusion and engagement strategy that integrates with the plan from a communication point of view.
• Set regular check-in points to review and monitor implementation and success.

Making hybrid communication a success

When you combine these strategies, something magical happens. You begin to embody what employees expect of a hybrid organisation. Asynchronous communication considerations, a communications method framework, promoting team cohesion, upskilling digital literacy, and combating information blind spots with a communication plan – together, these create your launching pad into the workplace of the future. 

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Trust is the foundation of the employer-employee relationship, and perhaps this is why hybrid and remote models work so well. Employees who work from home at least two days a week are just as productive as their in-office counterparts. Plus, they have higher rates of retention –  resignations fall by 33% compared to traditional work environments.

The mass exodus of top talent from Tesla and Amazon backs up the data – 71% of workers surveyed said they would start looking for other opportunities if their company mandated a return to office. Given more than half of employees surveyed would forgo a raise if it meant they could work hybrid, remote work may be your secret ingredient to improved attraction and retention. 

So if corporations are moving away from the physical observation model, how can you ensure that you are:

• Maintaining organisational standards?
• Trusting your employees to get their work done?
• Motivate underperforming employees?
• Ensure productivity in a remote or hybrid environment?
• Tackling communication and feedback issues?
• Setting expectations and KPIs within a remote or hybrid model?
• Managing potential disengagement or isolation challenges?

In this article, we’ll explore an easy to apply four-step management strategy that you can use when managing performance in a hybrid or remote environment.

Revisit performance goals 

Firstly, you should revisit performance goals and objectives in a hybrid/remote context. We’re familiar with how to transition from a physical to a remote environment, but many organisations forget to redefine what the expectations of KPIs and performance look like in a hybrid model. Some things might change, for example, the nature and regularity of one-on-one’s and catch-ups between line managers and team members. 

So help your team understand the expectations, know what success looks like, understand what the expectation is for them, and what their outputs are. Then ensure their success by ensuring there are practical ways to achieve these expectations. 

Remember that within the remote and hybrid work model, flexibility and adaptability is the key.

Set up one-on-ones with your team members

Create regular space for one-on-ones with your team members for open sharing and feedback. This is valuable in the physical environment, but critical within hybrid and remote models. 

Providing safe spaces for your team members to give feedback and share what’s happening can help lift their emotional burdens, detect isolation or personnel issues they may be experiencing, and identify blockages preventing them from completing tasks. The informality of a one-on-one can encourage the sharing of any issues sitting underneath the surface that may not normally get addressed.

Use digital communication

Using digital communication to increase touchpoints takes strategy and intention. It’s very important to think about how you can use those digital communication tools to increase the way that you’re connecting, and where possible, choose solutions that emphasise human connection and relationships. The biggest part about remote and hybrid is the isolation or fragmentation from the rest of the team and from the usual interaction. So by increasing communication, even if it’s digital communication, it can be very helpful in just bridging some of those gaps.

Create regular routines for how you maintain communication, using different digital touchpoints. This will typically mean selecting one source of truth for internal messaging, external messaging, video conferencing, project management, and documentation. Try to avoid doubling up on tool types to avoid employee confusion and streamline processes – having three types of project management software or two internal messaging platforms is a recipe for chaos. 

Many organisations will make the choice between using Google or Microsoft as their bedrock of software solutions, so start there.

An example of digital solutions based on Google Workspace

• Google Workspace and Drive for documentation.
• Slack for internal messaging.
• Zoom for video conferencing.
• Email for messaging clients or external stakeholders.
• Trello for project management.

An example of digital solutions based on Microsoft Office

• Microsoft Office (including SharePoint and Teams) for documentation, internal messaging, and video conferencing.
• Monday.com for project management.
• Email for messaging clients or external stakeholders.

Identify and support any skill gaps

Finally, it’s a good idea to identify any skill gaps and create support solutions. You can use assessment methods or feedback mechanisms to identify where skill gaps might be and what they are for your team. 

Digital literacy is one of those skill gaps that more closely resembles a skill chasm. 87% of jobs in Australia require digital literacy skills. Yet a quarter of employees believed their digital literacy skills to be out of date, and more than half had little understanding of technologies that are increasingly vital to the way we work. Find ways that you can support and help those individuals to take their skills to the next level, whether that be through on-the-job training, mentoring, coaching, or using training programs. 

Leading with consistency and reliability sends a strong message to your team that you value them and find their contributions important, which is really a powerful part of using this four-step management strategy.

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So, if it’s widely accepted that customer service can make or break a brand, that also explains how company behaviour when dealing with complaints and angry customers has got a massive impact on how that brand is perceived.

Why do customers get angry, and why is this an issue?

Despite millions of dollars being spent on customer service, a good deal of interactions with customer support still leave people feeling angry, frustrated, and dissatisfied. Particularly now, with the explosive nature and impact of social media, it’s never been easier for customers to share their experiences and reviews with a large audience. A recent example of this was a customer who spent $1,000 on X (formerly known as Twitter) advertising to express his anger over his father’s lost luggage with British Airways after the company didn’t respond to his original complaint after two days. This generated thousands of impressions on X alone, then went viral on other social media platforms, and was even picked up by the traditional media. Even then, it took the airline another 24 hours to respond. Pretty terrible.

You may be wondering, why do customers get so angry? Well, it’s not always the issue that drives the anger, but the perception of the issue. Most of us would agree that managing customer anger is about managing the perception of the issue, which helps diffuse the customer’s emotions and behaviour, particularly if you’re face to face. Easier said than done, right? But at the core of perception is always the belief of how we are being treated and respected through the process.

How companies inadvertently create angry customers 

Many companies have rigid policies that inadvertently create disrespect. For example, consider the disrespect for customers’ time through being put on hold. They’re manoeuvred through multiple customer support departments, trying desperately to get to someone who can actually help you get a solution, only to find that they get put on hold again. It’s all very frustrating. This loss of power and dignity is doubly insulting when our public message is that our customers are the priority, but our actions transmit the message that we couldn’t care less. There are countless examples of poorly managed and avoidable incidents where companies come across as impolite, sarcastic, rude, and dismissive.

Another common issue we see in some organisations we serve is customer’s beginning and end-state experience being very different. When the customer is looking into a product or service, sales coaxes them in with social proof of a customer-centric culture where the customer is valued. They set the bar high and create high expectations. This is a great example of sales doing their job well, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. The problem arises if the product, service, or support available (i.e. the back-end) doesn’t meet these sold expectations. 

We all know what it’s like to buy into a product or service, only to have an issue crop up that requires resolution by a support team member. What should be a straightforward process becomes a nightmare as you’re put on hold for elongated periods of time. Or the modern equivalent, get stuck chatting to an automated bot or virtual assistant trying to get through to a real person. This leaves you feeling disempowered, unheard, unseen, and angry.

We want to avoid this type of situation at all costs.

How to diffuse and respond to angry customers

Respect is the cornerstone of building trust. To be received as genuine, this respect needs to be driven and represented through the organisation at all levels. Less than 4% of customers will actually let you know they’re angry, and 91% will never return. So it’s critical that organisations work to understand the source of angry customers’ frustration and use those insights as opportunities for improvement. To that end, here are five fast and focused tips to deal with angry customers.

1. Empathy before direction. Establish your customer’s value and importance. Then listen to their needs before you give them directions. Even though your priority is to fix and solve, their priority is to feel that you care and respect them first.
2. Ask before telling. One way to do this is to respond by asking questions, versus trying to explain and defend against your customer’s attacks and accusations.
3. Positive acknowledgement. Always respond using positive acknowledgement phrases. For example, “I appreciate it’s frustrating” or “I understand it can be very confusing when you get conflicting messages on how to resolve this.” Well-placed apologies can be useful too. Your customer just wants to feel validated.
4. Establish a calm state before attempting to solve the issue. Wait until the customer displays signs that they’re starting to calm down and come off the ledge before you start working on the resolution.
5. Ask for feedback. Get an update on your customer’s status, how they’re tracking, and express gratitude and appreciation to them. You never know what you’ll learn when you take the time to listen. Their piece of feedback may lead you to revolutionise your product or take your service to new heights. 

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• Overwhelmed with current workload.
• Lack of forward planning or clear strategy.
• Ongoing tension and conflict with other team members.
• High staff turnover.
• Employee absenteeism or lots of sick leave taken.
• Low productivity or morale.

Each of these examples are telltale signs of resilience issues. If you can relate to any or all of these, then here is a practical externalisation planning exercise that you can do in 30 minutes that will help you identify the causes and map out a practical way forward.

Clean up your MES

Our blueprint, which we call ‘clean up your MES’, is a tested technique which we teach in one of our popular workshops – Going from Stress to Strength.

MES stands for map, explore, and support. It’s a good way of externalising or downloading your thinking around what might be happening and gaining some fresh perspective. Then you can map out a strategy that will help you to increase resilience and deal with some of the trigger points that could be happening in your team.

Mapping the triggers and causes

Let’s look at map first. The map stage is essentially all about identifying the triggers and the causes. We’re talking about the stress triggers and then the causes or the drivers of those moments of stress. What we would really recommend you do is spend about 30 minutes reflecting and documenting all the things that you feel are triggering team stress on an average day. It could be many things that are doing this, but here’s an example.

Let’s say one stress trigger is up line task expectations, or what more senior people or supervisors are expecting of the team. There’s task pressure there. Perhaps individuals aren’t meeting deadlines and therefore causing some negative impact to other people’s responsibilities during the day. Once you’ve identified what those main triggers are, then we’ll move on to the causes.

This is where we once again write down and start looking at what we might believe are driving those stress triggers. Perhaps there might be lack of up line understanding of current workloads, which are creating an unrealistic expectation. That could be a driving cause. Or perhaps there’s some poor planning practices with certain members of the team or individuals, therefore, that’s what’s causing the deadline issues.

Exploring the situation

When you’ve identified what the driving causes are, you can move on to the next part of the process, which is to explore. Exploring in this context means we’re investigating what can we do about this situation, or as we like to call it, ‘solve or surrender’.

What we mean by this is that many of these issues can be resolved through a bit of creative thinking – this is the ‘solve’ part of solve and surrender. Of course, it’s also possible that after some brainstorming, you realise that there’s nothing within your power that you can do, or that there are external forces inhibiting a solution. Therefore, we take on a mindset of surrender. This might sound negative at first, but it’s not.

Solve

Where possible, think of different solutions that could bring about change or solve the issue. For example, if we take the up line workload expectations, perhaps we can meet with the particular people concerned and explore ways that workflow could be improved. We may be able to set new expectations, or create fresh boundaries and consequences for the individuals who aren’t meeting deadlines.

Surrender

When we get to the surrender stage, it can feel like having open-ended tasks on your checklist that are difficult or impossible to cross off. It can be an uncomfortable feeling. What surrender means is finding a way that we can gain emotional closure over things that aren’t able to be solved. So, let’s say there’s an issue that can’t be resolved, and it is what it is. For example, your marketing team wants to be known as ‘The Marketing Mavericks’ instead of ‘Marketing & Communications’. You’ve approached the leadership team and their response has been a resounding no. Therefore, we need to find a way we can support the team and ourselves with ways of diffusing some of that frustration. In other words, finding somewhere we can rest our mind and find closure. Once you do that, it creates some level of boundary with your emotions, which can help to reduce the emotional pressure. Additionally, it helps to offload it rather than allowing ongoing anxiety around things we can’t possibly control.

Support your people

The last part of MES is support. Support is about acknowledging hope and encouragement. It’s about people’s motivation and internal strength and trying to increase that. Because we know that when people feel encouraged, supported, and acknowledged, they’ll generally start to grow in their resilience. They’re able to move forward more effectively. Even in situations where they can’t do anything about a situation, and it’s an ongoing frustration.

The key real strategy here is to find ways to support the emotional weight of your team and create practical strategies to achieve this. For example, perhaps regular debriefs will allow your team to vent. Or perhaps you can point out a few things each week that people are doing well as individuals or as a team. This can go a long way in helping to build resilience levels. When we feel acknowledged, respected, and valued, it can help us to pick ourselves up, gain some light at the end of the tunnel, and give us the strength to keep moving forward positively.

How will you clean up your MES?

Using the MES strategy is an easy way to gain some mental clarity, to put some practical strategies in place, and build resilience in the team. We hope this has been of high value to you and that you find the ‘clean up your MES’ technique useful in approaching some of your team’s stress triggers, as well as finding some positive techniques to move forward.

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Laser focus principles

So how does it work? Well, laser focus is built on two principles. 

The first principle is something called an adaptive strategy. Think of it like a GPS. If you plug in a destination in your GPS and you get off course, the GPS kindly reroutes you and gets you back on track. So having an adaptive strategy is like that, where you’re able to deal with the unpredictables or the unexpected things that happen in your day and reroute and get back on track quickly.

The second thing is to have a system. Most of us have tools and methods we use, and it’s easy to fall into the habit of reacting to the traffic that comes in on those devices, rather than having a system that helps you manage that traffic. Having a system is about becoming the master of your tools and methods rather than the slave. So let’s have a look at this in a little bit more detail and in a practical example.

To-do list prioritisation

Many of us benefit by having a daily to-do list because it helps us to get rid of task clutter that might be holding up our mental faculties. There are different ways to do this, but the most common way is to write your to-do list down on paper. This is partially explained by the therapeutic value of reducing your stress levels by physically writing things down and downloading the task clutter that can sit in your head. Of course, there are also digital task management systems. The most effective tool is the one you’ll use, so choose what works for you and stick with it. 

Once you’ve written down your tasks, prioritise them. The basic prioritisation levels are normally high, medium, or low. If you use a task management system, you’d also know that the other prioritisation element is the date. For example, if meeting with Rob is a high priority, then you know that needs to be done on the first of December. Same thing with the client call, first of December. That is the deadline and that is the priority. 

Using a priority system of high, medium, and low:

• High stands for critical, things that have to be done today, and can’t wait until tomorrow. 
• Medium means important, but not critical. If you get to it today, great, but if not, you can do it tomorrow. 
• Low being trivial, things that you could either do when you’ve got extra time or you can put off for a few days.

 Alternatively, you can use the ABC type approach. So rather than calling it high, medium, and low, you use A, B, and C. Let’s have a look at that in a rejigged task list, the same task list before. You’ve translated those highs, mediums, and lows into ABCs. The only problem is you’ve got five high priorities without any distinction. How do you decide which of the high priorities on the first of December to tackle first? This is where you ring in another level and where laser focus comes in.

So for example, let’s say the client call is your most important task out of all the A tasks. So you’d call that your A1 and then prioritise all the other A tasks based upon their order of critical nature. So you’d then have an A1, an A2, an A3, an A4, and an A5. (If you’re sticking to the high, medium, low system, you can call these High1, High2, High3, etc.) 

Laser focus kicks in because what you need to do becomes crystal clear. You can only focus on one thing at a time and you’ve mapped out your task list from a productivity point of view to reflect that. When you have multiple things you’re trying to focus on, it starts to degrade productivity and productive energy. Using an A1 strategy means that all you’ve got to do once you’ve mapped this out, is just focus on that A1 task. 

Making your to-do list adaptive

Here’s the adaptive part. Things can change with little notice, for example, a manager unexpectedly says there’s a new critical task that has to be done, and you have to rework everything. All you need to do is re-prioritise the numbers according to what is the new A1. For example, there’s an issue with the CRM and your most important task is now updating the CRM. That becomes your new A1, and all your other tasks are reordered accordingly. If your role is hugely adaptive, and you need to reorder priorities multiple times a day or week, make sure you’re using a task management system or to-do list layout that is easy to alter. 

Remember, all you need to do is just keep focusing in on what your A1 or highest priority task is. This helps you to manage the rest of the task clutter and feel less overwhelmed, because all you’re required to do in any one moment is focus on that A1. If that changes, you reorder what that A1 is, and then you get going with that.

Laser focus is a quick strategy that’s definitely useful to helping you order your tasks and gaining that laser focus. Happy tasking!

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Of course, the two can work together. Bad service can lead to bad experience, and service is about the logistics of how a product is provided. But experience needs some thought and design to get right, because it’s all about customer impact.

So what are the hidden costs to an organisation when they don’t get that experience strategy right? In this article, we’ll list the seven deadly hidden costs of poor customer experience, alongside a five point checklist of simple things you can do to improve customer experience.

1. Poor experience leads to brand damage

Cost number one: poor experience leads to brand damage. This is about the hidden cost of damage to your brand when there is a poor or ineffective customer experience strategy in place. Approximately 87% of customers rely on Google reviews, with a four-star review being the minimum rating for most people to engage with a product or service. Did you know that it takes approximately 40 good reviews to remove one bad one? Forrester reporting surveyed over 200 enterprise brands and more than 1,000 customers recently and found that businesses underestimate how often customers have poor experiences by an average of 38%.

So this really begs the question: do you have a customer service strategy or do you have a customer experience strategy?

The increase of angry customers recently has also become problematic, with many organisations overwhelmed with complaints and frustrated customers, which affects these ratings dramatically. Did you know that 73% of customers point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, whereas companies that prioritise better customer experiences has dropped to just 10%?

Prioritising experience sets you apart from the competition and sets you up for success with your customers.

2. Poor experience impacts staff retention

Increased stress on the staff creates retention risk, and you can lose your talent very quickly when that happens. Recent research points to service businesses experiencing increased staff quitting due to the hostility of angry customers. This links staff retention and poor customer experience and reveals the negative and personal impact to people serving on the frontline.

Attrition rates, high customer service roles, and losing experienced staff is costly. It’s also not that easy to find skilled customer service staff who can represent your brand and organisation in a way that becomes an integral part of creating that positive experience for customers. Creating better working conditions and prioritising customer experience may help counteract this risk.

3. Poor experience increases costs of retraining staff

This follows on from the previous point. If staff turnover is high, and you’re constantly recruiting and training, it becomes a large expense. This cost would be better redirected into an effective retention and nurturing strategy for existing staff.

We can all think of at least one company with an incredibly bad staff support culture that’s created a revolving door of staff joining and then leaving soon after. Not investing and nurturing your staff is a false economy, which affects your bottom line and immediately impacts customer experience when there is low morale amongst employees.

4. Misunderstanding customer impact touchpoints can create poor experience

Not understanding or empathising with customer touchpoints can lead to blind siding or poor customer experiences.

A classic example of this is when you’re put on hold for a long time, trying to get through to customer service on the phone. Some organisations work really hard at reducing this timeframe and may use positive acknowledgement messages, or offer a ‘hold your place in the queue, and we’ll call you back’ strategy, to create customer empathy. However, other organisations seem completely insensitive to wait times, and this is a major frustration for their customers. This is a classic result of focusing on a convenient, effective delivery mechanism (read: service), versus designing a better customer experience strategy.

How many customers does an organisation lose through frustrating access times with a lack of care attitude? How many people can they impress or relieve through offering a callback or similar? This is becoming more crucial to consider as technology and the ability to talk to a real human gets overtaken by cost-effective tech.

5. Poor customer experience can lead to a competitor sale

If you don’t have a good customer experience strategy, it can create easy sales for your competitors. The comparison sale happens when your client has had a bad experience with you. By default, you’ve made the competition look good. The customer will use their bad experience as a reference point, and anything that is slightly better will look amazing. This means that not only have you lost a customer, but your competitor doesn’t have to work as hard to gain their business. You’ve made them look really good.

6. Lack of attention to customer experience leads to increased marketing costs

If you haven’t paid enough attention to creating a customer experience strategy, you’ll have to work harder on the front-end to continually attract new business. It’s a well known fact that it costs far less to invest in existing customers who love you rather than the cost of buying a new one. If you don’t have an experience strategy, however, you’ll need to invest more in marketing and advertising to make up for this.

7. Underestimating your brand’s potential can cost you

Finally, underestimating brand potential and market penetration by not focusing on customer experience strategy can hurt your business. Many customers cite that positive customer experience is their most important criteria. So if that’s the case, how far could your organisation’s brand go with a well thought through customer experience strategy?

Five things you can do right now to improve customer experience

We’ve gone through what can happen when you ignore customer experience or prioritise service over experience. Now it’s down to what you can do. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

1. Create a customer impact blueprint. Identify touchpoints, gain impact data, and review how you can improve upon that data. What can you do better?
2. Develop a service charter to create better practice standards for your frontline team, so everyone is on the same page.
3. Identify how you measure the success of that blueprint. Then, charter and monitor the performance of it.
4. Train your staff with professional skills and proactive customer service strategies.
5. Lastly, employ an effective support framework strategy to sort to nurture the resilience levels of the team.

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But why do we use this word specifically? Well, when you think about it, we use busy as a coping mechanism to help us verbalise how we’re feeling at any given moment in our day, when the stresses of people and task pressure are upon us.

Busyness and stress perception are enemies of productivity

When you think about how words create our world, it’s possible that we’re programming ourselves with this perception of busyness and reinforcing task stress and chaos around us. “I’m too busy right now,” is a state of mind that can contribute to a stressful or busy reality.

Now, the real question here is – what mental and emotional state are we bringing to our tasks? Are we making it easier for ourselves, or unwittingly, are we recreating more task stress? Increased stress or stress perception is the greatest enemy of productivity and can sabotage the time we do have through wastage and lack of mental focus, resulting in procrastination and thought fragmentation.

If we started with a different focus in our mindset, what would that do as far as making a difference to our productivity?

Six ways to create a less busy workflow

Think momentum over task. If we start our day with a primary goal to focus on creating positive momentum versus pushing through a busy task list, what impact might that have? Research tells us creating positive momentum is the best breeding ground for productivity and achieving increased outcomes. Here are six ways to achieve that practically.

1. Rather than creating a task list to begin your day, think about working on things that support a positive momentum mindset. Then integrate those practices into your day. An example is changing your self-talk. Stop saying, “I’m too busy,” and start saying, “I always have time for the important things.” This is how you create a new reality.
2. Build space into your day for regular breaks. Stop thinking you don’t have time to do this and push through without a break. Even though it may feel counterintuitive time-wise to take a break, it’s ultimately more productive momentum-wise to take breaks and you’ll likely boost your productivity.
3. Negotiate deadlines. The biggest issue with big workloads is when you don’t negotiate deadlines or test when the real deadline is. In our culture of busy, we must practice breaking through the noise and asking – when does this need to get done, really? As soon as possible isn’t an acceptable answer. Once you’ve been given a definite deadline, it’s also important to communicate your ability to achieve the deadline. If it becomes apparent that you can’t deliver a project by its due date, let stakeholders know as soon as possible and let them know what you need (time away from other projects, resources, money, etc.) to achieve the deadline.
4. Develop focus work zones and find spaces for block-out work. Increasingly, our days are taken over by admin and overhead tasks. Making space for deep work is critical if we want to work on meaningful work rather than busy work.
5. Create healthy boundaries. This is a tough one, but if you truly want to become less busy and give yourself that essential breathing room, you need to manage relational expectations, balance your workload realistically, and stop creating ambitious task lists.
6. Take deep breaths often.

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One of the biggest challenges when leading a hybrid or remote team can be the impact of communication. Communication is the bedrock of understanding and connection, so we need to be mindful of how we’re communicating and tailoring our messaging to the medium we’re using.

For example, think of a time you opened a Slack message or email riddled with spelling errors. This simple miscommunication increased the time it took you to read, digest, and respond to the message. Perhaps you needed to clarify certain points in the original message before you could respond properly, leading to more run-up time to resolution.

Miscommunication also happens in the office, but the complete lack of physical interaction in a remote environment can certainly impact the organic collaboration of your team. It doesn’t have that spontaneous synergy that you get in person. The good news is that you can reduce or eliminate some of these communications issues by creating a clear communication blueprint for your team. Here are four practical areas to cover in your communication blueprint.

Implement standards and expectations

General standards and expectations – in other words, the cultural protocols or the conduct that is expected within a remote environment, is a key area to cover within your communication blueprint. This should include the expectations for:

• How frequently employees communicate. Are there guidelines on how long it should take a team member to respond to an email? How about to a Slack message?
• Who to communicate to in periods of uncertainty or struggle. Have you made it clear who to speak to about particular challenges?
• Meetings. How often do you hold meetings? Do you keep minutes? Are there any guidelines team members should consider when planning how long a meeting will take? Are there any protocols to follow?

Setting these standards and expectations helps ensure your people aren’t in the dark or guessing at how frequently they need to communicate. Others can disengage within a remote environment, which makes setting an expectation really important.

Set best uses for specific tools

The next thing to consider is tools and their best practice use. We usually communicate out of a level of convenience rather than the best method. In a remote and a hybrid environment where there’s a larger reliance on chat tools and the like, we should build a framework of what the expectation of standards are around those tools and when to use them.

For example:

• Client communication occurs over email or phone.
• Internal communication happens via Slack message.
• If you’re dealing with a sensitive issue or need to collaborate with multiple people, use Zoom or video conferencing, so that you can hear tones and read body language more easily.

Establish team touchpoints

When you’re in a hybrid or remote environment, the ability to have spontaneous or natural organic interaction can be stifled. To counter this, we can create specific touchpoints where the team can openly share and feedback with one another. This helps to cultivate that sense of community and tribe they might be missing from the physical environment.

If this is done regularly, then employees can start to have confidence and rely upon the fact that their issues or challenges can be aired in an environment that’s specifically geared to unblocking them. Sessions are ideally facilitated by a manager or leader to keep them moving in the right direction with a framework of how they need to be conducted. Whichever way your team decides to go about this, it’s critical to facilitate that sense of open sharing you often get in the physical environment.

Support digital literacy skills

Consider how you will support digital literacy skills in your team. Everyone has differing digital literacy levels, yet these skills and ability to communicate digitally are critical within a hybrid or remote environment. Therefore, it’s important to establish training pathways that support less digitally literate employees and guide them into developing their digital literacy and increasing their skills through a practical framework. It’s up to you how upskilling occurs, whether that’s mentoring, coaching, training documentation, training sessions, or a combination of these.

Create your communication blueprint

These four ideas are just a jumping off point. I encourage you to consider other elements and techniques that will take your communication blueprint from great to fantastic and set your team up for effective remote communication.

If you’re looking for further training around digital literacy or creating communication standards within your hybrid or remote team, feel free to get in touch.

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