TIPS ON DEALING WITH IRATE CLIENTS AND NEGATIVE
FEEDBACK FOR BUSINESS OWNERS
How would you really react?
Receiving negative feedback is neither learning from it, nor is it resolving it. Even in your personal life and personal issues and experiences, though it is normal to feel bad or sad about any kind of negative event or observation about you, your simple and reflexive feeling of sadness or feeling bad, while perfectly understandable, neither makes you learn from the experience, nor does it do anything to resolve the matter - or possibly prevent it from happening again. I know this sounds counter-intuitive but it is a fact if you really think about it.
What are the effects of this on your personal life?
Normally, negative feedback sometimes lead us to negativity. But for business owners these are distractions in life that you need to cancel out for your life to be in harmony. Thinking of negative thoughts and living with negativity will destroy you if you don’t do anything to stop it. Personally, over the last year and half I’ve cut a multitude of people that drag me down in one way or another. I’ve focused in seeing negative things as positive things because the more I give in to my negative thoughts the stronger they become. It’s important to divert your attention to get away with negative things. Life is too short to focus on people/things that suck the life out of us.
What you should do?
Choose not to listen with the pessimism indulges in the negative talk. Be wise enough to walk away from the nonsense. Always choose to Ignore pessimistic comments, If people say stuff that pulls you down then just ignore them, because your business is not the same a year ago, a month ago, or a week ago. You’re growing, experiences and learning won’t stop and that’s life. In fact as a business owner, when you receive this kind of feedback at work and about your company, then depending what kind of person you are, of course you are entitled to feel bad … but do this only for a second… do not let this “bug you down for a time”
What are you supposed to do?
Ask yourself:
1. Factual: Why did this happen? What are the complete facts, and more importantly, what are the details of the facts? Are they verified? (“FACT” means verified data, not opinions, not feelings, not speculation)
2. Valid: Given the above complete factual information, is this person’s complaint/issue/anger actually justified based on facts (remember not all people are the same and have the same motivations for relaying negative information). Only when you have verified data do you start empathizing with the client and putting yourself in their shoes- which are very important.
3. Analysis: If the negative feedback is factual and valid, what are you currently doing wrong that caused this to happen?
4. Action: Temporarily, what should you do now?
5. Analysis and Action: Permanently, given No.3, what should you change so that this kind of incident does not happen again?
There are no steps for “feeling” bad or “speculating”… it is all about information-seeking, verification, analysis, and action.
Remember: Only think about issues and events that are verified and valid. People’s intentions are not as black or white as you would imagine.
To expect no negative feedback is wrong, in fact you should seek it. Negative feedback happens to the best companies implementing the best systems. Feedback, whether positive or negative is good- it is a mirror- that just like in our daily lives, we use to see our own reflection so that we can act on what we have seen.
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