Today, Ryan Carson published a brilliant post on his blog Carsonified! on “How to Deal with Abusive Customers”. He talks about the story of one customer who turned abusive and concludes:
once-in-awhile, you get a customer who is just cruel and really doesn’t want to be helped. In those cases it seems best (to me) to state the facts to them in a professional manner, and move on.
Indeed, the old adage “the customer is always right” has its limits. There are customers who cannot be argued with reasonably. Customers can and do get abusive. And such extreme cases are a pain to deal with. Ryan’s suggestions are to the point: Stay professional and don’t let yourself get drawn into it.
This is quite easy when you’re selling a product or service that does not per se require an intimate relationship between you and your customer. However, there is a very ironic twist for anyone working in the personal coaching or therapy business. I’ll try to explain:
Working with a coaching client (“coachee”) requires a special kind of relationship: A mixture of genuine empathy and professional distance. For an experienced coach, this is daily routine, but it can be daunting for newcomers to the field. This basic issue aside, what to do when a coachee turns uncooperative, demands a refund, or even gets irate and abusive like the person in Ryan’s story?
Of all the coachees I’ve worked with over the years, only two fell into this category. We had built up a working relationship and had a couple of coaching sessions. Then, suddenly, those clients became abusive, left irate voice messages and e-mails, demanded a refund, even threatened and tried to blackmail me.
In both cases, a “diagnosis” was easy, and I understood why they reacted like this: It was part of their underlying issue on which we had worked on during the coaching sessions. Ironically, as a result of the sessions, they regained their self-confidence (both were management type business people who had sought my assistance because of assertiveness issues) and tried immediately if it worked.
As ironic as it is, simply understanding why they reacted like this did not help with the abusiveness issue. Imagine that, within the working relationship between you and your coachee, she turns irate for whatever reason and refuses to cooperate. As coach, you are supposed to support the coachee, right? After all, it’s written down in the contract and (hopefully) your work ethics. Now in a normal coach/coachee setting, you would tackle whatever issue the coachee has, but this requires her intent to cooperate.
The abusiveness, however, cannot be tackled within the setting, and as soon as you break the setting, you inevitably lose the coachee. It seems impossible to break out of this double-bind without letting go at least one of the two basic personality traits: genuine empathy and professional distance. Let go of empathy and lose your ethics, let go of the distance and get caught up in an abusive mud-wrestling.
Solutions, anyone?
In one of my two cases of abusive clients, I did not refund any money; in the other, I did. Both clients had similar basic issues and both reacted similarly (abusive language, threats, blackmail). However, considerations on the prognosis of their issues led me to the conclusion that client A was already stable enough to handle my “turning down,” while client B would probably have suffered an even more severe bout of her issue. I sort of invested a couple of hundred Euros on client B (by refunding her fees) in order to support her even though she did not cooperate overtly.
Thus, I kept my professional distance to both of them, and I kept my genuine empathy. Of course, I was p—-ed off at first, because I had thought that they were accusing me of something that I had (or hadn’t) done, but this anger faded when I looked behind the issues that had brought them to react like they did.
So here is to all coaches: Forget about keeping or breaking the setting and keep your focus on the client. Sounds easy, can be painful. (Seek supervision if it is.) At any rate, you will learn lots from your abusive clients. I’ve had my fair share of those and hope that you’ll have at least one as well. There’s enough for all of us.
