When the Customer Drops the F Bomb: Where's Your Line in the Sand?

Why nobody in the store can handle a conflict 0:00

Steve Shaw: Here we go again. Dave Rogers, Steve Shaw, Fixed Ops Focus. What's on your mind tonight, Dave Rogers?

Dave Rogers: Well, car business stuff is on my mind. It's always on my mind.

Steve Shaw: "The car business is on my mind." I love it. It could be a country song.

Dave Rogers: Listen, it's summertime. It should be the busy season. Listening to what's going on out there, it seems like everybody's busy and we've got a lot going on. So I'm hoping for a great June, and we'll see how it goes with vacations and everything else. It could go to shit really quick.

Steve Shaw: Well, speaking of going to shit really quick, I've been getting flooded with text messages and DMs, even on my personal phone from people who know me. And the topic today was conflict resolution. The texts I got from a couple of different people were, "Why is it that nobody in my store can handle conflicts?" And I started cracking up. It's a tough topic. We bring people aboard, and they're just not capable of handling a customer. One particular guy said everything rolls over to him. He's the veteran, not a manager, one of those career advisors. He said, "They dump it all in my lap and ask me to handle it." What do you think about that?

Dave Rogers: I think it's a huge issue, especially with a lot of younger, inexperienced advisors and managers in the business. What did we hear the other day, a thirteen-month average tenure for a service manager? It's baptism by fire, pretty much. You've got to have thick skin. You've got to be able to handle it. And if you're not trained, it's trial and error: see what works, get your brains bashed in one day, and hopefully you learn from it. You know as well as I do, every customer's different and every situation's different. That's something you learn in the business. There are plenty of times you go home thinking, "Geez, I handled that one wrong," and you think about it for a couple of days. So it's true. We don't teach it. It's baptism by fire.

Throwing money at the problem 2:25

Steve Shaw: There are a lot of different ways to look at it. I was thinking about it before we got online. My default mode is training: we don't train these guys how to handle it. It's been said that we're a service business, and stuff is going to go wrong. There's no question in my mind, stuff is going to go wrong. Service is really all about what you do when something happens. How do you fix it? How do you make it right? How do you handle that particular customer? I think we do a very bad job of conflict resolution. Damon says give frictionless service. Well, we do our best, and then something goes wrong, and then what? "Let's just give the guy a discount."

Well, I don't really need a discount. I have a particular issue. I have a problem, and I want it solved. I didn't want to be here for four hours in the waiting room before you told me I needed ten hours' worth of work. It's not about the money. Money is probably the least of the customer's issues at that point. But somehow the default is to throw money at the problem, and that creates a whole other set of issues, versus finding out what's really wrong with the customer. I think you're right that we just don't take the time to listen, hear and find out what's really in the customer's head, so we can solve the actual problem.

Dave Rogers: When I look at it, casual observation, and I'm not criticizing any one generation or basing this on age, it seems to me that a lot of frontline people care more about the customer liking them than about making money or doing the right thing. It's all about whether Steve is going to like me, so I can go home and feel good about myself. And when things don't go their way and aren't smooth, it makes them take a step back, and now they're on the defensive. I've watched advisors at the front line for years, and you can see it during the conversation. Maybe the customer's a little aggressive, a little demanding, maybe forceful, and you can see the advisor start taking a step back, on their heels. And you can see the customer gear up and launch. They're ready to attack.

If a customer senses weakness, they're going to jump all over it. If you've got a service advisor who's new to the job, maybe doesn't know the computer system or the brand that well, whatever the case may be, and has no confidence in what they're saying, a lot of times the customer's just going to run all over them. They're going to bulldoze them, because they know they've got somebody who's weak. And now where are you going to go? You're behind the eight ball, on the defense, not forward-thinking, and they're just going to eat your lunch.

Steve Shaw: And I don't have any tools in my toolbox. The only thing I know is money. So I'm discounting, I'm giving rental cars, I'm giving away the farm. And then there's this guy next to me who happens to have one day more experience than me in the business. "Dave, what do I do? Can you help out?" Maybe I'm that seasoned veteran, the career advisor, and now it gets dumped on my shoulders, and I'm the de facto fixer in the store while the manager sits in his office. I know things like that happen in our stores. The text message I got was along those lines: "My manager's sitting in his office, he's not helping out, and I'm over here fending for myself. I don't know what to do. My job sucks. I'm going to give the farm away, and then I'm going to get yelled at by the manager who wouldn't help me in the crisis."

It's not personal 6:50

Dave Rogers: The guy next to you becomes the complaint department. It's like the bullfighter going "Olé," pulling the cape back, and the bull hits the next guy. But again, they don't know how to resolve it, and people take it personally. I mentioned this once before, and it's no indication of anything other than youth, because I was the same way when I was younger. In my late twenties, as a service advisor, when a customer started yelling at me, I took it personally. You have to learn it's not personal, and it takes a little while to get the thick skin, to be able to let the customer air it out, let them vent, do the whole thing, instead of being the "right fighter," as my mom used to call it. There's always somebody who's just fighting to be right, and you can't be that way.

And to your listener's point, we don't teach it very well, because it's just not a fun subject. And you can't cover everything: "If this happens, do this. If that happens, do that." That's what a lot of people want, a flow chart for each situation. Some of the manufacturers used to teach it years ago, live in-person classes on, maybe not conflict resolution, but how to handle the hostile customer, learning personalities and how to deal with people a little better. As a manager, I never spent any time teaching anybody how to deal with it. It was, "Earn as you learn, baby. Let's go."

Steve Shaw: Well, we actually do teach conflict resolution. We have a class specifically on how to handle a hostile customer. As you said, there are so many things that could go wrong, so we don't teach "what if this, what if that." We teach one approach for when a customer has an issue. You listen to them, you demonstrate empathy, you restate the customer's concern, not necessarily in that order. But you do these steps to defuse that customer. My whole book was The Art of Pass or Fail. If you don't defuse that customer, the customer wins. You lose, you fail, and the customer is going to walk all over you. So it's an art, a skill, a talent, to learn how to defuse that situation.

Chris Voss, I don't know if you ever followed him. He was the chief hostage negotiator for the FBI, and he wrote a book called Never Split the Difference, all about the art of negotiating. He said never meet somebody halfway. His funny example was that you want to wear your black shoes out, and your wife wants you to wear your brown shoes. So you split the difference and wear one black and one brown. What happens? You look ridiculous, your wife's upset with you, and you're upset with her. That was a lose-lose all the way around. So it's important that we learn the skill of negotiating to get to an amicable solution for the customer.

Right for the customer, right for the dealership 10:29

Steve Shaw: I've got to go back to my Saturn days. And just so everybody knows, I think Saturn is trending on YouTube, because we have a video of Steve Shaw talking about Saturn and customer enthusiasm that's kind of gone viral. It's got thousands of views. It's like the most popular clip ever. I don't know how that happened. But back then I had a regional manager at Saturn Corporation, Don Crowder. And Don would say, "In any situation, the first thing you always want to look at is what's right for the customer, and what's right for the dealership." It's got to be a win for the customer, a win for the dealership and a win for the advisor, and then it's good all the way around. I'll never forget when he told me that. Even in today's day and age, the customer is still always right. If a customer is upset, we've got to figure out what their expectation is and look for a way to resolve it in the customer's favor. As much as we all want to win, we might win the battle, but are we going to win the war?

Dave Rogers: No, you're not. I was talking to a general manager today, a former fixed ops guy, by the way, and he had a great line. He said, "None of my employees are allowed to tell a customer no. I'm the only person in the store allowed to tell them no." If you don't tell a customer no, you're probably not going to get a lot of conflict. I thought that was a great line. He just happened to tell me that at lunch today.

The man who beat the hood of his Mercedes 12:02

Dave Rogers: I tell this story. I was at the Mercedes store in New York, and everything was glass after the image remodels. I'm in my office looking out, and I see this guy pull into the drive fast in an E500. He jumps out of his car, grabs the advisor and pulls him to the car. The advisor looks inside the car and puts his hands up, like, "I don't see it." And the guy starts beating the hood of his own car. At the time it was probably an eighty-thousand-dollar car. He's in my drive, a short guy, just beating the hood of his car.

So I go out there, and I'm looking at my advisor. He was an experienced guy, but he just didn't know what to do, because the guy was nuts. I walk out and say, "What is going on? What are you doing? Can you imagine if we were beating on a car like that, what people would say?" And he starts screaming and yelling that his radio reboots. The infotainment system would just reboot and come up with the Mercedes star on the dashboard. I said, "Okay, and what happened? Did the car shut off or anything?" He said, "No, the radio just reboots." I said, "You're beating the hood of your eighty-thousand-dollar car because your radio reboots? You know what? We're not going to be able to do anything for you today. You need to go see somebody. You have anger management problems."

I told my advisor to pull the car out and send him on his way. I said, "Sir, you've got to get some professional help before I'll deal with you again. You can't come into my drive screaming and yelling at my people like that." Listen, I've been doing this a long time. I don't casually throw people out of the store. But this guy called me two hours later and said, "How much do I owe you?" "For what?" "For the counseling session. You're right. I'm losing my shit over a radio." I said, "Let me ask you a question. Is it your wife's car?" "Yeah." "Is she getting on your nerves about the thing?" "Yeah." I said, "I understand why you did it. You just can't beat up your car and cuss out my people in the drive over a radio."

My advisor laughed at me when the guy called back. I said, "Hey, Jeff, the guy called back. He wants to come back in." He said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think he's calmed down now. I think it'll be all right." He didn't know what to do. He thought the guy was going to turn on him and start hitting him. I laugh about these conversations, because there are certain times when you do have to tell people to just get out. You really do.

Steve Shaw: There was a group I worked with years ago, I'm pretty sure out of Denver, whose slogan was "Yes." I knew two dealers like that. One was "Yes, we can," Corley's Lincoln Mercury in Albuquerque, New Mexico, many years ago. I don't even know if they're still around. And the dealer group out of Denver always said "Yes, with options." We could never, ever say no to a customer. And it was great. There's always a way to get to a solution. Yes, yes, yes. I love it. And you were talking about the radio situation, and I'm thinking, is it a Wagoneer? Maybe Chrysler is using the old Mercedes electronics from those days.

Dave Rogers: Well, Daimler did merge with Chrysler for a while, so they might have gotten some of the technology.

Restate it so they know they've been heard 15:29

Steve Shaw: Exactly, a little shared technology. But I think about that in my life, even outside the car business. What's so powerful is what we always teach: you have to restate it. Whatever the customer's issue is, you have to let them know you heard it. You can't just tell them you understand. You've got to restate it. I find that in my world, I'm always doing that with people. If somebody says something to me, especially if they're angry, I restate it so they know they've been heard. I think it's one of the most powerful things you can do, making sure the customer has been heard. And I'd bet you did it in that situation: "So what you're saying is, you're beating your hood because the radio's bad." And he finally goes, "Duh." He didn't even realize what he was doing. You put it out loud, and all of a sudden they hear it: "This guy gets it, and I'm a knucklehead."

Dave Rogers: Right. And I hate to say it this way, but there's a lot going on in people's lives out there. They're stressed out, whatever the case may be, and these little things are the straw that broke the camel's back. I used to kid around and say some people need a little tragedy in their life to get a reality check. I don't mean I want them to have tragedy, but their perspective and the way they look at things is totally off. For some reason it's more than acceptable in the United States to come into a car dealership, lose your shit and scream and yell. Years ago it was the only place you could do it. Now it seems like you can do it everywhere: on a plane, on a train.

People have to understand there's a lot going on in everyone's life, and that one little thing just happens to be the last straw. Maybe the person's struggling to make a living, they lost their job, they've got a five-hundred- or eight-hundred-dollar-a-month car payment, or there's something wrong with their baby, and they're taking it out on you. That's where you can't take it personally. That's where the education comes in: "This guy's having a bad day. I'll listen to it for a little bit."

Where the line in the sand is 17:55

Dave Rogers: The one thing I've never put up with, once I became experienced, was a customer abusing my employees. That was always the tipping point where I'd ask them to leave. "You don't talk to my employees that way. This isn't the nineties anymore. I can't talk to them that way, and you can't talk to them that way." Like Bob said the other day, throw out a four-letter word and get thrown out. It doesn't work that way. You have to draw a line somewhere. But it generally starts when that customer has been told no, or "I can't," more than once. And that's where saying yes, always saying yes, is going to defuse the situation 90% of the time.

One thing somebody taught me years ago, I forget who: when a customer asks you a question and you don't know what to do, you say, "You know what? I don't know. That's a great question, Steve. Nobody's ever asked me that before. But I'll find out." It turns it around, because now Steve Shaw thinks he's the smartest guy on the planet, because I'd never heard that question before. People would get all puffed up about it. I don't know who taught it to me, but it used to get me out of so much trouble with customers. "Nobody's ever asked me that before. That's a great question. I'll find out the answer." And that buys you a little time.

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. It's always fine to take a break and go figure out the answer. What I find interesting in our class, especially when it comes to conflict resolution and handling a hostile customer, is this. Listen, I'll drop the F-bomb every 30 seconds in my real life. It doesn't mean I think you're a no-good MFer. It's this effing machine, or this effing problem. And I always hear advisors say, "I'm not going to take it. When they start cussing, I'm out." Listen, if you tell me to stop cussing, guess what I'm going to do?

Dave Rogers: Light into you and cuss more.

Steve Shaw: I'm going to light into you and MF the F out of you. There's that shirt with the F-word used every way, and I should be wearing it all the time in my personal life. It doesn't mean I don't like you. It's just a verb. I kid around about it, but there are many people in the world like that. As professionals, we have to understand that's just how I'm dealing with my frustration: this effing car or this effing situation. But often an untrained associate will say, "Stop cussing." Now, I agree with you, there is a line, and everybody's line is slightly different. If you say me and my family are no-good SOBs, okay, fine, we're done. But if I'm just saying "this blankety-blank car" or "this situation," we've got to allow a customer to vent.

A good professional could restate that same thing and have the conversation in the same language the customer is using: "So your effing car is doing this." The other thing people get carried away with: we always talk about tone of voice and smiling and standing up tall. But there's a time when you've got to whisper. You've got to bring it down a little, because if I start bringing it down, my customer starts to bring it down too. It's not rocket science, and most of our listeners probably understand it. But a lot of our associates really just don't get it. The message is that we have to impart that wisdom to them. People do come in with situations, and we've got to be better than that, recognize it and understand how to defuse it, or at least not escalate it. Just don't escalate the situation.

I had an exercise in a class a long time ago with a volleyball. We had two teams going back and forth. I'd throw the ball and give a scenario, whatever happened, make my problem known. And we had one of those drag strip lights: red, red, red, and then green, green, green. So you had four or five chances. If you said the wrong thing, it got escalated, and if your team said the right thing, it brought it down. The first team to get through the whole process without escalating the problem won. It was super fun to do. But that's a whole-day training class. Is it worth it?

Dave Rogers: It's definitely worth it. You have to learn how to do it. A lot of times that's the man or woman who advances in the company: you've learned to read whether a problem can be resolved, even between two employees. It's not just customers. It could be an employee or a vendor. If you can't resolve problems and defuse a situation, there's probably a limit to your advancement too. That's part of what makes you a manager, or a better manager.

When the employee starts the fight 23:33

Dave Rogers: A couple of years back, a woman advisor in one of our stores did exactly what you were saying. She decided to draw a line in the sand because a customer threw the F-bomb out. He didn't call her an F-in-this-and-that. He was just throwing the F-bomb out, like people in the Northeast do. "Pass me the effing salt." It doesn't mean anything. You're just being colorful. But she made a big deal out of it. I happened to be standing there, and I had to tell her to stop. She wanted to throw the customer out, and I'm like, "He didn't do anything wrong. Will you get over yourself?" It was a power trip.

I don't know if I told you, but I was at Lowe's a couple of weeks ago. They've got everything self-checkout, your favorite. There were two registers on the right-hand side, a person at the first one, and at the second one, closest to me, an employee of the store was standing there looking for help, because I guess the register wasn't working. So instead of standing next to that register, I went around the employee to move closer to the front one. And this woman, an employee of the store, goes, "Hey, where are you going?" I said, "I'm moving up." She starts yelling at me: "You can't, there's somebody there. You have to wait." I said, "I am waiting. I'm just moving closer to the register." I took a step.

I started laughing, and I said to the kid at the end who checks you out, "Wow, somebody had their oats this morning." He said, "Yeah, she's always yelling at somebody." It's almost like the employee was picking a fight. I'm thinking while you're talking, we should go back and train her on conflict resolution. Actually, in her case, it's not starting a conflict. Nobody was doing anything, and she started one. What is wrong with this lady?

Steve Shaw: It's funny you say that, because if we don't know how to handle it and we handle it incorrectly, then we become the problem. I'm not going to say it's a practice of mine, but it's not that hard to get somebody to become the problem. We service professionals know this: if somebody's treating you poorly and they slip up or do the wrong thing, whatever insignificant thing I was asking for, a refund, a new product, a fix, becomes insignificant, because now you decided to yell at me and cuss at me. So you become the problem, and I get whatever I want. I might have to go see a manager or a supervisor, but as soon as the associate says the wrong thing, they become the problem. The real problem just becomes a freebie. It never gets resolved by that person, and you've proven to your supervisors that you're not capable of handling it.

Quite frankly, going way back to 2023, when my book The Art of Pass or Fail came out, that's why I wrote the whole book. It was a rental car situation, and it was crazy. I won't go into it. It was the whole Seinfeld episode: I was supposed to have a car, and they didn't have one. I got there and waited and waited. People kept saying, "I understand, Mr. Shaw." I said, "No, you don't understand. I've got to be somewhere." And it escalated into what could have been a simple, "Hey, how about a free day? Let us take care of you." We'd have been good to go. Instead it became a drawn-out, super-long conversation. All he had to say was, "That's a no-brainer. We should have kept your reservation, Mr. Seinfeld," and life would have been fine.

But it got so high. I can't even remember who I ended up talking to at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, somebody at the top. Because now we'd both dug our heels in, and somebody was going to do something at that point. That particular associate became the problem, and I was not going to drop it until I got what I wanted. And I think even more in this day and age, our customers are looking for the associate to become the problem so they get whatever it is they want.

Dave Rogers: There are a lot of opportunists out there, and I tell people all the time: they're looking for you to slip up. They're looking for that little edge, some way to get in there, whether they just want to be right about something, feel good about themselves, get a discount or get something for free. I don't think that way, because being in the car business, we're the biggest laydowns in public. We don't argue with people, we don't complain. We just don't push back, because you're tired of fighting with people all the time. But you're right. When there's a customer out there looking for the opportunity, you just can't feed into it. That's all it is.

A dollar sign on the forehead 28:53

Steve Shaw: And Dave, you said it in a previous episode: if it gets to me, it's free. Every GM on the planet is going to give it away. So you'd better do your best and just give it away and move on with life, or handle the situation, because if it gets to the GM or somebody higher up, it's done. It's over.

Dave Rogers: One of my mentors, my best mentor, I spent a lot of time with him. We used to carpool for a while. A great guy, really personable, and he could put on a look and talk to customers. He was a "Yes, and right now" type of guy, and he was really good. But I knew he did not like people. He just was not a people person. I used to ask him, "How do you do that? How do you look at somebody when you know they're trying to get over on you?" He said, "Dave, it's real simple. I don't look at their eyes, their mouth or their nose. I look at their forehead, and I see a dollar sign. All I want is that dollar sign. I'm looking to make money on this transaction. I never forget there's a dollar sign on the other side." I thought that was a great way of looking at it. And that's really what Bill was saying today: no one else is allowed to say no but him. You don't want that kind of environment. You want everyone saying yes. You want all the business, and you don't want to be the reason people don't shop with you anymore.

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. I have a buddy who says, "Don't get mad at your money." On that note, I think you ought to wrap us up with a GM tip of the day.

Dave Rogers: The GM tip of the day: do you have a way of training your people on conflict resolution? You probably got to be the general manager because you could defuse a situation here and there. We do have a class on it in the university. But if you're not training your frontline people how to handle these things, or at least coaching them after the fact, that's what's missing. Once something happens, you've got to pull the employee aside and have a coaching conversation. There's got to be learning from it. Unless you have that, you're never going to raise up the people who work for you and get them to see a different view. It's a great topic, and I'm thrilled your listener sent it in, because you don't think about it that often. But conflict resolution is probably just as important as the ten steps to the sale or anything else we train people on. That's my tip of the day: train it up.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Train conflict resolution. Sounds like a plan. Let's get out of here. I'll see you later on in the week.

Dave Rogers: All right, man. Good tip.