Challenging Customers - Love Them or Leave Them?

My husband and I have been blessed with many wonderful customers over our 25+ years owning and operating a residential construction business. In fact, I could count on one hand the challenging ones.

One customer in particular caused me many sleepless nights and more than a little stress for a few weeks. The relationship started out on a positive note, but quickly turned south when it became clear that their expectations and ours could never meet at a place of compromise.

If you own a small business, you will likely run across some customers who try your patience and may even cause emotional turmoil and undue stress. Here are 7 tips, from a Soulpreneur's perspective, to help when you encounter disgruntled customers.

1. Keep Your Cool. When you're upset, don't make rash decisions. Remove yourself from the situation, if possible, so you can look at it with fresh eyes. Time and distance can give you time to think about the interaction from all points of view.

2. Everyone is unique and different. Understand and accept that personalities will clash from time-to-time, and it's a normal part of doing business. If you understand it's normal, you can learn techniques to help you handle them without getting excessively defensive and taking it personally. Customer conflicts happen to the best of us.

3. Customers are human too. You don't know what's going on in their lives. Maybe their dog just got run over, or they just got fired. With intuitive listening you can hear what they may not be saying. Observe their tone of voice, body language, and the key words they use to get clues about what may be going on in their life. Try putting yourself in their shoes for a while. Empathy can go a long way towards resolving the issue at hand.

4. What are you learning that you can use in the future? We learn with every customer interaction, good or bad, what we can do differently in the future. In every experience are the seeds for a new way of looking at life - and the potential for doing it better in the future. This becomes clearer once you're past the emotional aspect of the interaction. Again, time and distance will give you a new perspective on the situation.

5. Where are you placing your trust? Are you stuck on looking at the challenging customers you've had in the past, or are you able to trust in the basic goodness of most people and focus on the ones you want now? If you keep your mind on the type of customers you want, you're placing your trust in the ability of the Universe to deliver them to you.

6. Visualize and affirm what you want. Your thoughts send magnetic signals that bring back to you what you think about, in the same way tuning into a radio station picks up that station's frequency in the ethers. Make sure you're tuning your thoughts into the frequency of the specific type of customers you want - customer's that are prosperous and easy to serve. I have a 3x5 index card on my refrigerator that says, "Wonderful, prosperous customers call us daily wanting our quality construction services."

7. Trust in yourself. You can't always trust in other people, but you can always trust in your inner guidance. If you're meeting with a prospective customer and get that feeling of dread in the pit your stomach, it may be a warning that it would be better to refer the person to someone who is better suited to their personality. Always listen to your feelings.

Turning challenging customers into great, easy to-do-business-with customers is not usually an easy task. Sometimes it's better, as we found out, to let them go as quickly as possible, learn from the experience, and focus on bringing the customers you really want to your business. Then you can focus on meeting, or exceeding, their expectations and getting those valuable referrals.