August 2008

 If you work with the general public, you are going to face it sooner or later. If you own any business long enough, you are going to square off against it. If you are a member of the human race, you will have to deal with it at some point.

Conflict.

Conflict is rendered in more than just the six o'clock news. Conflict is found in every day life, in every day situations. Managing conflict with a win-win mindset is often a gateway to creating opportunity and further enhancing your company's brand identity.

One exercise BrandVision uses to showcase this idea I call "Good Cop...Bad Cop". We do this exercise as part of Brand Training. We bring up an employee and ask them to create a customer interaction setting in which the customer is upset. I explain that we're going to run through the scenario twice. During the first pass, I ask the employee to respond to the agitated customer with aggression of their own...to give in to their own frustrations and just let that customer have it. What we typically see is anger that meets anger escalates tension which only leads to more and more anger and very little resolution. Next, during the second run-through, we ask the employee to greet that customer's anger with compassion, kindness and understanding. With this approach, we see tension diminish greatly. It's like throwing a baseball directly into a brick wall while standing two feet away versus throwing the same ball into a net. The former is going to ricochet back on your head while the latter will fall harmlessly. That is essentially the point of the exercise. The "Good Cop" helps moves beyond the conflict and restore a healthy sense of relationship with the customer. The "Bad Cop" destroys any semblance of relationship, leaving the brand hurting from the experience.

Conflict when managed properly can actually serve to benefit the relationship between customer and company. It's an opportunity to use the situation to do exactly that. The first step is easy. In most cases, the best thing to do when conflict arises with a customer is to agree with them wholeheartedly.

Take Dish Network for example. I recently upgraded to HD. The tech who installed the new receiver rearranged my system so that the receiver was located where the DVD player used to be. Further, the DVD player was not accessible on any of the other five input sources. Obviously, I was furious. When I got through to Dish Network, I was less than happy. The first customer service rep I encountered was not helpful. He greeted my anger with his own frustration and the tension simply escalated until I cussed him out and he left me in one of those infinite loops in telephone customer service Neverland.  When I was forced to call back and start the process from scratch, I was livid. However, I calmed down when the next rep simply said, "Wow! That is sooo frustrating. You just don't mess with a man's entertainment center...I am sooo sorry; that should not have happened." Suddenly, I felt like I had someone willing to not only understand my situation but a friend who would help me out as well.

By agreeing with the customer's plight, even if it's insanely unreasonable (as mine wasn't, mind you!), you're going to defuse the bomb. After all, it's nearly impossible to be angry with someone who agrees with you wholeheartedly. This will immediately win you a friend and an opportunity.

Brand relationships are like any relationships. Conflict, if constructive, can help strengthen the bond. If destructive...well, that's a different story altogether. But, if  you walk into a business with a problem and walk away from that business with the problem solved and feeling like you're doing business with someone who is going to take care of  you now and down the road, that company has managed conflict and maximized opportunity. Conversely, if you walk out of that business damning the day you say that first article or ad about them, well, then the company mismanaged that conflict and missed a chance to further strengthen a relationship with a soon-to-be former customer.

© BrandVision Marketing. 2008. Matthew Scott Trueblood. All rights reserved.

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