How Emotional Logic helped one company deal more effectively with customer complaints

During one of our business trips to South Africa, I was talking with the head of an IT department about the challenges of running a team of 30+ employees and maintaining forty servers.

He spoke about some of the challenges his staff team were facing, saying “Of course, in our job the first call you get on a Monday morning is never, ‘Hi, what a great job you are doing!’ It is always an urgent problem or a complaint to sort out.” He decided to ask one of our leading Emotional Logic tutors to run two, 2-hour Emotional Logic workshops at lunchtimes on handling complaints. 

Did it help? A member of his team dealing with customer complaints gave me this feedback.

“Learning Emotional Logic has been great. You get straight to the heart of the problem for whoever it is, so you can see quickly what’s important to them. The customer feels listened to. It takes the stress out of handing emotional situations.”

This conversation in South Africa remained with me. Not only had his team learned enough Emotional logic in that time to use it effectively, but they had clearly grasped the purpose of using the power of such unpleasant emotions in this constructive way. It reminded me of a nurse in North Devon in the UK, who had learned how to integrate Emotional Logic into the way she cared for patients and relatives on a hospital ward. She told me that the other staff always pushed angry relatives in her direction, because she had a reputation for being able to defuse their intense emotion rapidly and turn conflict into cooperation. 

Of course, these two encounters only served as affirmations of the effectiveness of a contract I had once fulfilled to train the staff of a complaints department at an NHS hospital in the UK. English being the language of Shakespeare, this department was called instead the ‘Patient Advice and Liaison Service’ (PALS). But this spin accurately described the clever purpose of this service, which was to turn a patient’s grievance about an NHS department’s work away from a conflicted and growing attitude of complaint, into an effective review of the matter by that department, resulting in a learning response from them to ensure no repetition of systemic or technical failure could occur.

Emotional Logic fitted the bill perfectly, and the staff were praised for their effectiveness. The secret was, I was told, that the Emotional Logic skill of naming the hidden losses in a situation, not just talking about feelings or behaviour, meant that the NHS department could be informed by the PALS worker of the true concern and personal values of the aggrieved patient. Then a response could be made after a systemic review that directly addressed the patients true concern. Everyone felt heard.

If you would like to learn how to use the power of Emotional Logic to deal more effectively with unhappy customers or colleagues, contact us for more information.