Customer Service
How to Deliver
Bad News
in a Good Way
by Nancy Friedman A long time ago, we at Telephone Doctor Customer Service Training, decided to remove whatever negativity in our life we could. We removed as many negative words, negative thoughts, and, yes, even negative people as we could. This has proven to be fortuitous during the current pandemic crisis. Many of you are probably giving some not-so-greatnews to your customers and maybe even to your employees. Even during normal times, every once in awhile, owners, managers or staff will need to share negative (bad) news with their customers. We asked ourselves how we could do that effectively without saying, “I have some bad news.” I’m not sure about you, but I’ve never met anybody who enjoys
16 The Franchise Woman
receiving bad news. So what we did was remove the words “bad news.” We just don’t say it. The customer NEVER hears it. When the ‘you know what’ hits the fan and you need to call a customer to explain something that’s not just right, try our Telephone Doctor “mission possible” technique. It works faceto-face, as well. It simply goes like this. “Mrs. Jones, I have some good news, and I have some not good news; which would you prefer to hear first?” You let the customer decide what they want to hear first. Good news or not so good news first. Here’s an example: Let’s use the premise that their order did not come in time to make the original appointment.
