Best way to handle Hostile customers

My Journey in the Footwear Industry that lead me to Zappos #11

In Blog #10 ,I talked about focusing on solutions and executing in steps. In this post, I want to talk about how to handle hostile customers.

There’s a great article in Forbes that that lays out 7 steps in dealing with angry customers. However, I’m going to add another scenario and solution which involves employee safety.

Things were really coming along well in the store, we had a really good team, and our shrinkage problem disappeared. Now, we were making our numbers.

New Opportunity

Dave our district manager, came into the store one day. He was a jovial type of guy and was great to work with. We had a really strong relationship, and he liked to joke around a lot. But on this day, he got down to business.

“Mike you really turned this store around. We have an opening in our largest store, so I want to promote you as store manager over there. This was a huge compliment and a big vote of confidence to me. So I accepted the offer!

I hated to leave my old team, but it was too good of an offer to pass it up. I got there the next afternoon and met my new team. They seemed like a good group and eager to learn. I walked the store and took some notes, then I went to…