Our Only Role in Customer Escalation
By Lauren Costella-Reber
I’ve been in customer success for over 10 years, and just recently, I was attending a course taught by Griffin-Hill expert Daren Baird. In this course, he was talking about objection handling, and in the course of the discussion, customer escalations came up.
His summary of our role in customer escalations was something I’d never considered before. He said, our role - our only role - is to move a customer from their sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system. That’s it.
This concept was extremely interesting to me because I’d never heard anyone talk about the psychology and physiology of how humans work and the important role this plays in Customer Success. We all know intuitively that we need to meet customers where they are and de-escalate an escalated situation, but the concept of moving a customer from their “lizard” brain to their “thinking” brain was not a concept I had thought about in that way before, and I wanted to share this with the CS community.
To begin, we have to talk about what the parasympathetic and sympathetic parts of our brain are and why they matter. Humans are the only animal that have a dual nervous system. Our dual nervous system allows us to process information. The system that most of us are probably familiar with is the sympathetic nervous system: fight or flight. This is the “lizard” part of the brain. It’s the side of us that many of us in CS are most familiar with when dealing with escalated clients. When a client is upset, they may “fight” by yelling at a support representative or your CSM. They may “flight” by ghosting you or your team. In any case, this is the part of the brain that’s reacting to a situation versus thinking through it.
Unlike the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic part of our nervous system is where we do our thinking. We can rationalize and consider the situation and act in a thoughtful versus spontaneous way. Even if the result is the same - the customer churns or stays or doesn’t get a full resolution to the issue - the difference is, the customer is thinking and working with the team in the right state of mind. The thinking state of mind.
With this understanding in mind, Daren then shared some incredibly helpful steps, seven in fact, for first moving a customer from the “lizard” brain to the “thinking” brain and then getting to the core issues affecting the customer. I wanted to share them with the community, since the escalated customer is all too familiar to anyone in Customer Success. And you may be surprised by some of the suggestions. Enjoy!
Step 1: CSM or Support representative needs to validate the customer. Intuitively, most people understand this, but it can be difficult when a customer comes out swinging. Couple that with a long day for the CSM or Support representative, and you have yourself a recipe for disaster.
The phrase Daren shared was this: “Thank you, Customer. It makes perfect sense to me that you want to make the best decision for you and your practice.” The importance of this phrasing cannot be understated. Note how this isn’t saying, “I understand what you mean about XYZ, Customer” or agreeing with them by saying, “If that were me, I’d be upset too.” We are validating and agreeing that we want to make the best decisions for the company and that sets the critical stage for diving into elaboration.
Step 2: present the customer with open ended questions. You can say something like: “My job is to empower you to make the best decisions for your company. Do you mind if I ask a few questions?” Phrases that can be used for elaborating include: “Can you expand on that?” “Tell me a bit more about how that impacts your company.” Keep asking questions and listen. Listen for everything you can and take notes, since you’ll want to repeat back what you heard.
Step 3: Once you’ve asked as many open ended questions as you can, say Thank You! And then repeat back what you heard. Validate with the customer that what you heard is correct. For example, “Mr. or Ms. Customer, I captured ABC, did I hear that correctly?”
Step 4: When the customer has confirmed everything is correct, you then ask: “What other challenges or problems are you encountering with our solution or services?”
I LOVED this step. Instead of just trying to solve one issue at a time with a customer, we are working to understand if there are additional risks or issues in the customer experience they haven’t voiced to us. This is our opportunity to get everything out in the open. In CS, we are in the business of identifying early churn risk, and what better way to do that than when we are already on the phone or working on an issue with a customer.
As the customer lists off more issues, you continue to repeat steps 3-4 of asking open ended questions, thanking them, and validating what you heard. And you keep asking if there are issues until the CUSTOMER (and that is critical…the CUSTOMER says there are no more issues. Again, the goal here is to get everything out onto the table for discussion, not just the one thing that drove the customer to their breaking point.
Step 5: you move into isolation and prioritization. It’s very easy to want to dive right into problem solving but depending on how many issues the customer raises, there could be a variety of complex solutions needed and not enough resources to do them all at once. We all know that prioritization and focus allows us to actually achieve the end solution. In this step, you repeat back to the customer each issue you heard, and ask the customer which one is most important to them.
Step 6: Once the customer has prioritized these issues, then you can work on a solution and subsequent plan to get there with timelines for that top priority. Timelines are key. Most of us come up with great solutions and next steps, but we fail to identify when those steps will occur, who owns them, and when we will follow up with the customer. Don’t make that mistake! Book the next meeting or steps with the customer on the call, and follow up via email with the plan.
Step 7: Keep working on the outstanding issues with the customer until there are no more to be solved.
And there they are! The 7 steps to de-escalate an escalated customer. But remember, the only job we really have: moving the customer from sympathetic (fight or flight) to parasympathetic (thinking). Without doing that, we can’t possibly use the above steps because the customer (and sometimes even us too) aren’t thinking, we are simply reacting. And in that state of mind, we are nothing more than lizards.
The Success League is a global customer success consulting firm that offers coaching as well as CS Leadership certification training. Please visit TheSuccessLeague.io for more on these and our other offerings.
Lauren Costella-Reber - Lauren is a change agent, communicator, leader and passionate champion for Customer Success. When she’s not working as the Chief Customer Officer at Dental Intelligence, you can find her serving as an advisor for The Success League, a board member for the Customer Success Network, and blogging on the CS Playlist. Lauren has her MA and BA from Stanford University. She was a former USA National swim team member and enjoys staying active in the Bay Area.
