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With over 2 million customer service professionals trained, I bring you psychology-backed strategies for de-escalation, empathy, boundary-setting, and call control—all grounded in real-world call center experience.
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Whether you're leading calls or coaching a team, you'll find practical tools to turn tension into resolution—without burnout.
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Customer service calls can sometimes get out of control. Upset and overtalkative callers take time and energy away from other customers and tasks. This is where practical call-control strategies come into play. In this course, I explain why customer calls get out of hand and i...
People in my workshops ask, “What do I say when a customer threatens suicide?”Â
Customers in distress are stressful for customer support teams.Â
When customers threaten self-harm or harm to others, they’ve taken the interaction outside the boundary of sincere conversation.
Understand ...
As I prepare for a workshop for a new client in Upstate New York, let me give you three things you can do to help your team get angry customers to back down, techniques right out of my De-escalation Training.
One. Coach Your Team to Acknowledge Customer Concern
When staff acknowledges how hard thi...
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Act as if every lost customer’s value to the company comes from your paycheck.
Believe in the best of customers. Don...
Research at Harvard showed us the power of the word “Because.” The experiment had people ask to cut in a line of people waiting to use a copy machine.
Researchers had the peopl...
In today's competitive business landscape, customer satisfaction is the key to success. One of the most critical aspects of customer satisfaction is how businesses handle mistakes and apologize to their customers. Making errors is inevitable for any business, but how we react to those errors can mak...
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The De-escalation Technique Executives, Politicians, and Customer Service Leads Use to Stay In Control! (It Worked on My Husband!) The technique is: Here’s what we know, Here’s what we’ve done, Here’s what’s next Grab the worksheet I mention right here.
Note: I caught the typo, too late; that...
If a customer gives you pushback, argues, or asks for a supervisor, one of the three things is going on:
The customer doesn’t trust you
The customer fears something
The customer sees you as a threat to getting what they want
Watch my video to get two powerful techniques you can use to preempt an esc...
Chat support is not supposed to be rote like an ATM transaction. The idea is to insert a personal tone to build rapport and delight customers. You can do four things in chat interactions, starting today, to make them more human.
A participant in a workshop this week asked,
“Should I tell the customer to have a good day after giving them bad news?”
SMART question!
While we want the customer to have a good day indeed, and we want to follow the company call framework, we need to be gen
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Some of you know my undergrad degree is in Psychology. I taught college psych for several years before jumping into the customer service space.
I apply psychological principles to all my work in de-escalation and call control.Â
In last week’s super-fantastic 4-day De-escalation Academy, I taug
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Whether you work in sales, customer service, or collections, agents must present strong emotional intelligence skills to make the most of each conversation and achieve t
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