Or: Don’t talk if you can SHOUT! By Baz Taylor
It’s obviously frustrating when something goes wrong or someone is rude or not understanding to a point of view or unhelpful and the obvious thing is to complain. But there are appropriate ways to complain. Keeping calm is an important thing, to blow up or kick off is to lower yourself. This is probably difficult for all concerned depending on the nature of the problem, but to start shouting the odds and/or swearing is counterproductive for everyone concerned.
Let’s look at why people complain. The most obvious one is when something goes wrong with a service or an item and the person feels justified to make his negative feelings known. Other reasons are poor treatment, being passed around or previous bad experience. In most cases there is someone to deal with the problem, which is where customer services or support comes in. However the person complaining may rub off badly onto the person dealing with the issue, causing further problems such as not wanting to be helpful or blanking the person’s problem out.
Some people are understanding to a problem but others are demanding, obstinate, unyielding or ‘arsey.’ To properly deal with these sorts of people, it’s necessary to understand their point of view and feel sympathetic towards them. People who are not naturally sympathetic or empathic may cause a problem in that they are unable to understand another person’s point of view or are unfeeling about the situation. While this comes across as unhelpful it is not necessarily so. The reasons for it are that the person is naturally unapologetic and hard headed with their own opinion but it is not meant to be offensive to another, it’s simply a quirk of personality and there is no changing that. On the flipside it can be frustrating for someone to come up against someone so ruthlessly self confident and at times feels like banging against a brick wall, but it’s best to be patient and understanding on both sides for the best result to come out.
However there are some people who complain who cannot be reasoned with, weather it be bad attitude or bad mouthed. These people are virtually intractable and as such can be very upsetting to deal with. When someone like this comes up against a person who is naturally unapologetic, real fireworks are the result. These people may be aggressive, foul mouthed, demanding and highly strung. The best way to deal with them is to remain calm, listen and if so take action against them if they become irate or abusive.
To conclude, people will always complain about something, it’s just dealing with them in the right way that counts. Complainants will normally have a valid reason to complain, but those that just want to have a good whinge are not worth the effort to try and pacify.
