How do you manage angry customers when their behaviours are driven by mental illness or substance issues? Dealing with this type of aggression falls under the category of unpredictable. This means that unlike common aggression triggers, which may have easy to identify warning signs, this type of customer may be triggered by other factors that stimulate their reactions and behaviour. For example, drugs and alcohol related reactions, or certain mental illness, affects behaviour and communication.

The nature of how customer services are offered can make this more challenging for certain sectors or organisations. Services which have a greater degree of public access or offer public support services, can be particularly affected by customers who use substances or struggle with mental health issues. Of course, this doesn’t exempt normal goods and services from this type of behaviour.

Do angry customers respond to certain strategies?

Often, when we’re running a skill session for angry customers, people will ask, “Well, what about those who have mental illness or substance issues. Will they respond to these strategies?” The answer to that is generally yes and no, depending on the issue, and where the team’s current ability is when working together as a collective to display a unified and consistent strategic approach.

One thing is for certain –this can be a real challenge in creating a skill strategy for teams, because the issue is complex and may require a customised approach. For example, with the type of service that’s being offered, the demographic being served, or the location, may have a certain concentration of this customer type and a unique approach should be developed taking into account those community considerations.

So, how do we deal with this effectively? Let’s explore some key strategies that may help.

Focus on developing a team strategy

Focus on creating a team strategy rather than focusing on individual skills’ competency. Although individual skills are important, responding to angry or unpredictable customers requires a holistic team approach. Everyone needs to work together to provide the consistency and skill application to display a united front. That’s key. This also creates a greater degree of team confidence, which goes a long way to reducing the fear and intimidation that can occur with this type of incident.

Gauge which strategies are working for you already

Adopt a consultation approach to identify answers and strategies that already exist in the skill base of your team. Gaining behavioural examples from your team members and collating them into groups of common issues, is a good place to start to determine where you need to focus.

To make this work effectively, collaborate as much as you can. Work together to find out what the most common and successful ways of mitigating and dealing with those behaviours have been previously.

Create a best-practice approach moving forward

Once we understand which strategies are working, we can make a list of best practices or benchmarks to guide the standard practice response for those particular issues. So, once you’ve consulted the team and collaborated for optimal success, you can come up with a blueprint which essentially maps this all out. You can make it specific to your organisation and focus in on things like demographics or concentration of particular issues.

It’s important to note here we’re not talking about building a policy document. We’re talking about a behavioural document that empowers team members with more tactical strategies to develop behavioural changes and understanding of how to apply their skills in response to mentally unwell or substance-using customers.

Training your team on responding to angry customers

Finally, create a team-based training strategy to help support the gaps in the team as they transition to your best practice response model. In practice, this may look like hosting team-wide training to ensure consistent comprehension and understanding, creating print-outs, or displaying reminder infographics in key locations to reinforce this training.

What this gives you is a comprehensive, individualised, and solutions-based strategy to bring your team more success and less stress when responding to mentally unwell, angry, and substance-using customers in the future.