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Description: 

Long gone are the days when customers were so grateful to have any electric service at all that they would willingly overlook any service problems. Today's customers hold high expectations and don't hesitate to express their frustration and anger when they don't get what they expect.

Similarly, in this day and age, stories of employee frustration and anger are frequently in the news, often recounting horrific workplace violence.

This session is designed to address these issues by presenting some pragmatic approaches your people can use to defuse and de-escalate anger in others. The session specifically addresses important, basic aspects of anger such as anger begets anger (escalation), anger is a manifestation of underlying fears, and fears can be resolved logically while the pure anger cannot.

The session covers a rather broad range of dealing with anger, from doing things that are just good customer service to doing things to de-escalate potentially violent situations. It covers dealing with anger face-to-face to dealing with anger over the telephone. It covers anger involving customers or outsiders and anger from co-workers or subordinates.

We created this session because of numerous requests from utilities in our program to help provide information for their customer service people and field service people who often have to deal with angry customers but we have expanded the coverage to touch on internal anger among employees and workplace violence in general.

Approach: 
Primarily a structured one-way presentation. However, our presenters try to engage the participants in any session we do, so there is some opportunity for discussion, plus we open the floor to Q&A at the end. We provide a note-taking guide for each participant to assure they leave with at some written material on the key points.

Audience: 
All employees, regardless of job duties or position, but especially good for managers, supervisors, customer service/billing people and outside servicemen.

Size Group: 
Any size.

Estimated Time: 
2 hours.

Setting/equipment: 
Classroom or auditorium setting. A laptop and video projector or large screen monitor to support the PowerPoint presentation.