The Anger-Management Secrets of Customer-Service People

How to manage your anger when you can't get angry back

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

As part of my personality-change project, I took an anger management class.

The class was mostly devoted to teaching us how not to get angry at people we’re close to—our families, our friends. We talked a lot about how our relationships suffer when we yell instead of taking a deep breath and walking away. (This, alas, is pretty much the main anger-management tool out there. Saved you $300.)

But at points in the anger management course, I noticed that often, I was trying to manage other peoples’ anger, rather than my own. And it was the frantic scramble to calm the person down that made me angry, not the incident itself. What seems even more challenging than not yelling at your spouse or your kids is not yelling at people who you aren’t allowed to yell at. Because, say, you’ll lose your job or get arrested.

People often get angry when faced with an angry person. But it’s often the case that only one side of the interaction is allowed to express the anger: Customer on employee, boss on underling, cop on driver, authority figure on subordinate. The class left me wondering, what do you do when you can’t get angry? And is there anything you can do to slice through someone else’s anger?

I started augmenting the anger-management classes by interviewing people who specialize in wrangling “difficult people.” I called some customer-service representatives.

Detached empathy

The folks I spoke to all have lots of experience calmly handling people who are angry—often irrationally angry. But one of the first things I learned from them is that they don’t really take this anger seriously. They have a kind of detached relationship to empathy.

It’s not that they don’t listen to people, they do—and they take pains to show they are listening. It’s just that they don’t seem to own peoples’ negative emotions. They don’t let someone else’s anger become their problem. When a woman named Koku was working in a cell-phone store in Brooklyn a decade ago, customers would sometimes get worked up over perceived slights or inadvertently high phone bills. Her advice for staying calm was simple: “Don’t take it personal,” she said. “Why am I yelling about this? It’s not my $500 phone bill.”

One woman, who asked that I call her “Shelby,” told me she did not know the depths of peoples’ disdain for the IRS until she started working there some 15 years ago. All day, she helps people who are struggling to repay their tax debt, or who need help with their return, or who demand to know where their refund is. Whatever it is, it’s a problem. “No one's calling because things are great,” Shelby says. In trying to get their refund, callers will mention her race or sex. One caller told Shelby she wasn’t going to heaven.

Shelby has some natural advantages going for her. She’s a great listener and has a naturally calm voice. She uses a technique that’s common among the phone-based representatives I spoke to: She puts people on hold just so they can calm down. Over the years, she’s even received thank-you letters from some of her callers. But when she encounters vitriol, she seems to find it mostly ridiculous. She called the “heaven” thing, for instance, “hilarious.”

Similarly, S., a pharmacy worker whose customers regularly scream expletives at her, says she’s dispositionally very patient— “like a tumbleweed … I just keep rolling,” she told me. When someone starts swearing at her, she usually says something like, “Okay. Moving on.”

I told her that’s a remarkable thing to be able to say to someone who’s spitting out expletives.

But to her, it would be strange to get worked up over a job. “You have to prioritize what really matters,” she said. “Work is really low on the scale of what matters in my life.”

The first step in dealing with angry people, they seemed to imply, is to put some mental glass between you. They’re in they’re own space, getting angry, and you’re outside of it, doing your job. You can interact with them, but they can’t harm you. You can care, but not so much that you get hurt.

The Three A’s

Of all the people I talked to, those who had worked at Apple stores had perhaps the best training in defusing angry customers with sangfroid and efficiency. The company found a way to routinize empathy, assembling it like just another iPad. (“The term ‘empathy’ is repeated ad nauseum in the Genius manual,” wrote Sam Biddle in Gizmodo in 2012, when the site got hold of the company’s training manual.)

The original iPhone cost $500, far more than other cell phones, and people would regularly arrive at the Genius Bar hopping mad that such an expensive gadget had stopped working. 

It wasn’t always Apple’s fault—some had dropped their phones in the toilet, or forgotten to back them up—but that was little consolation. In those early days, people would get irritated if they couldn’t port their phone number, or if they had lost data, or if they weren’t eligible for an upgrade. Customers told one employee I interviewed that he had ruined their day.

Geniuses could repair some issues, but some problems required the customer to buy a new phone. And customers really, really did not want to hear that. Apple’s customer-service process, then, demonstrates how to remain in someone’s good graces even if you can’t change the ultimate outcome. You’re not really negotiating, but you’re making the other person feel like you are.

Apple’s training lasted several weeks, during which employees said the company taught them a process called the three As: Acknowledge, Align, and Assure. (In some permutations of the training, these are apparently called the three Fs, for “Feel, Felt, and Found,” but the effect is similar. Apple did not return a request for comment about this discrepancy.) 

Under the first “A,” you acknowledge the problem, hoping to make the customer feel understood. This could be as simple as saying, “Yes, it looks like your phone is broken.”

In order to “align,” you say something like, “I would hate it if my new phone broke right after I got it.” The point is to show that you would feel similarly in a similar situation, to underscore your mutual humanity. This helped keep customers calm.

Finally, you “assure” the customer that you’re going to find a solution. This is not always their ideal solution—that would almost certainly be a completely new, free phone—but the best solution you can realistically offer them. The phrase “here’s what we can do for you today,” was deployed frequently.

I asked a former Genius from Texas, who I’ll call Ramon, what he would say to me if I had come into the Apple store with a broken iPhone. It would go something like this: “Hey, Olga. Welcome to the Apple Store. My name is [Ramon], and I'll be helping you out today. I understand that you're having some issues with your iPhone. I want to ask you a few questions to understand what's going on. And after we chat about that, we'll figure out a solution together.”

Nearly every word of this shpeal was meant to avert frustration. In order to make the experience feel more personal, Ramon pointed out, he used my name, and then thanked me. “It's really hard for somebody to be mad after you tell them ‘thank you,’” Ramon says.

At times, this all sounded a little cheesy and corporate to me. At one point in our interview, Ramon said “feedback is a gift,” and I laughed out loud. But he still uses some of these techniques, even though he’s not at Apple anymore. When someone is upset about something at his current job, Ramon might say, “Thank you so much for sharing this. Let’s see what we can do together”—thanking them, involving them in the solution.

What I took from the Geniuses is that people react better to you—they get less mad—if you at least try to put yourself in their shoes. Or at least, if you seem like you’re trying. Maybe you wouldn’t really “hate it if I dropped my phone.” Maybe you keep your iPhone in a case. Maybe you don’t even have an iPhone! But there’s something about the expression of shared humanity that takes the bite out of bad news. It’s still detached empathy, of course, but the fact that you thought to say it is empathetic in itself.

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After talking with all of these customer-service workers, I still don’t think I could do their jobs. Work does rank highly on the list of things I care about. And I have trouble finding other peoples’ meanness “ridiculous.”

But if I just needed to get through a difficult interaction without losing a customer—which is what these workers do, after all—I could see myself reaching for some of these tips. I could see myself empathizing robotically and systematically—because sometimes, that’s the only way you can.