Working with Emotional Intelligence<\/a>,<\/em> Daniel Goleman likens this to a “social virus” where emotions are spread undetected from person to person.<\/p>\nThese unconscious emotions can negatively affect a person’s body language and tone of voice. These are two of the most important ways we communicate our attitudes to others, so a customer service employee who is “infected” can signal customers that they are in a bad mood without fully being aware they feel this way.<\/p>\n
Viewed from this perspective, expecting a customer service employee victimized by unconsciously communicated emotions to remain happy and upbeat is like trying to avoid getting the flu. You can take precautions to guard against it, but there’s no guarantee that you won’t be infected.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, both positive and negative emotions can be unconsciously contagious. Positive employees naturally cause their co-workers to quickly recover from negative emotions. Happy customers also influence the people who serve them to do better. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to provide great products and services backed by customer-friendly policies that are less likely to create angry customers in the first place!<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/span><\/strong>
It can be a challenge for customer service employees to effectively manage their emotions, but it gets even more difficult when all they get from their supervisor is an admonition to avoid taking it personally. Employees need coaching and encouragement to continuously project the positive attitude their customers expect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You may have heard the story about a Subway employee who lost his job after getting into a confrontation with a customer over ketchup. The short version of the story is a customer ordered a Philly cheesesteak sandwich with ketchup and an argument ensued when the employee insisted that Subway didn’t have ketchup. It nearly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7727,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,92,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7727"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}