MANAGING AGGRESSION
MANAGING AGGRESSION
What happens when someone gets angry?
As the anger grows, the body starts to react physically. You may feel you’re losing control, and are likely to show signs in the aggressive listed below:
When you are particularly upset or feel threatened, the body reacts in what is known as the fight or flight response. It’s getting you ready to stay and fight or run away from danger. If you can remain calm and assertive, you can defuse anger and aggression in others.
DO
1. Be assertive.
2. Be aware of your body language, appear to remain in control
3. Speak slowly and evenly if you appear calm this will have a calming effect.
4. Respect personal space.
5. Position yourself where you feel safe, i.e. stand slightly to one side and not directly face the person.
6. Make sure you have an exit route to be able to walk away from an aggressive situation you don’t want to be cornered.
DON'T
1. Get angry as this will increase the risk of conflict
2. Shout or point as this can be seen as aggression
3. Show fear or passiveness
Remove Triggers
Good customer service can remove some of the triggers that can lead to frustration and anger. Common examples of poor customer service include:
-Ignoring customers.
- Being rude or unhelpful.
- Having dirty or messy premises.
- Leaving stuff lying around and not tidied away.
The service tends to set the tone. Therefore, if different staff treat customers in different ways, or there seem to be different rules for different people, customers will not know what standards are expected of them. This can lead to arguments and conflict between customers and staff. Research has found that frustration and aggression are more likely if there are different standards. This applies to the physical surroundings as well as the behavior of staff.
The frustration caused by poor customer service may build up until the customer eventually ‘explodes. This could lead to a verbal or even physical assault on you, your staff or other customers. It’s better to try to calm people in the early stages. An example of this would be dealing with a customer’s complaint immediately and to their satisfaction. If people get to the top of the escalation phase or into the crisis phase, they are much more difficult to control and trouble is more likely.
People may remain in a ‘heightened’ state for several hours after an aggressive outburst and during this period it is easy to ‘trigger’ them into repeated outbursts.