Techniques for De-escalation

In this article we’ll talk about the behaviours and how you can get yourself into a neutral position mentally because you cannot deal with conflict or aggression if you’re feeling stressed yourself.  We share some techniques to calm ourselves down so that we can go through that and get to a place where we can actually deal with the conflict.

Learning how to prevent escalation with techniques available is helpful as it often starts off at a lower level, but then can escalate. Sometimes your customers may come in and they’re already escalating. Ideally it would be good to bring them down to a normal emotion or one that is more manageable. Prevention is better than the cure. So if you can prevent it going any further up the scale, the better it will be for us.

Using questioning techniques.

It’s quite important that we know how to question so that we can help customers use a different part of their brain for problem solving.  Help your customers to access self talk. That’s the voice inside our mind. It can be your own best friend or enemy.  It has some benefits for our own emotion too. Accessing our self talk so that we don’t panic ourselves. We can actually build up confidence by speaking positively to ourselves, and helps to deactivate our own negative speech, so that we don’t take on a lot more emotion than is necessary. We build resilience from that and that all behaviour is habitual. So we form habits in behaviour.

Changing the experience of our customers, just by changing their perception by what we talk to them about. We can change people’s mind and we can influence their perception so that’s what we do when we’re changing negative experiences with discussion and reaching new conclusions.

Questioning skills help to get to a place where the people that we’re talking to calm down. To get them to a place where we can actually have a really good, open and improvest conversation without the usual attacking.

Setting expectations

Proactiveness can pre-empt any dissatisfaction in any area, that’s what we have to do when a customer comes into it into your workplaces. By providing your customers with details about processes and policies that they will be subjected to, it can ultimately avoid conflict, and it’ll help you whilst you’re dealing with it because you can then refer to those documents if you’ve got to work things out.

Build Rapport

People actually behave better with people that they build a rapport with, and this helps you then direct the customer. How do we build rapport? Its all about similarities. Find out if you’ve got things in common.

Sometimes its just by being friendly to them without talking about business straightaway. Having a bit of small talk will build rapport and you can’t build a good relationship with anyone. Because that’s the icebreaking of relationship building. You can do it right off the bat. It’s not a major conversation. They walk in, you say, Hello, you smile, you look at them, and you can say how are you today or ask them for their name so that you can personalise the conversation.

Clear and Direct Responses.

The responses are not necessarily scripted directions, but knowing what to say when situations come up is a scripted response. Use Non-personal communication so we can remove emotion and pursue positive results with logic. So clear and direct responses make an impact.

Use Body Language

Use gestures with your key words. You can’t stand there and just have a face to face conversation or not use gestures. People use gestures differently in different moods. Give your words more impact by using gestures.

Be compassionate and be non judgemental.

Be hard on issues but soft on people. We can be hard as nails on an issue, because you can’t hurt an issue, issues don’t bleed.  We should though be soft with people because we hurt so easily. So being compassionate and non-judgmental is a major theme for de-escalation. Somebody else’s life may not be a major thing in ours, but it’s all about them. Do not judge or dismiss the distressing feelings of someone in distress.

Keep your emotional brain in check.

That’s your limbic system. Because when people are emotionally charged they will attack you verbally. What you’ve got to do is stop from joining in with their anger. We can do this by using our own self talk.  Use the internal voice to ourselves and say, “it’s not my  anger” and “They say I’ve got a genuine problem. I’m here to help them.” This is all internal dialogue and will de-escalate your own emotion to keep yourself in check. So be calm, professional and rational. Although you cannot control their behaviour, your responses to it will determine whether or not the situation escalates.

Show Empathy

What’s the difference between sympathy and empathy?

Empathy is showing kindness and trying that you understand. Sympathy is when you feel sorry for them.

Don’t ask challenging questions because it’s too much it’ll aggravate them. When things get too complicated for them they may emotionally respond. They need to actually quickly be able to answer yes or no to your questions without putting them on the spot. People don’t make decisions when they’re emotionally charged. Sometimes they need to go away and think about things.

Mentally check in

Who here has to mentally check that you can actually deal with the conflict at the time? Sometimes if you’ve got the luxury of having other people around, you can ask them to deal with a specific customer. However, we have to prevent conflict. If we’re in a bad place mentally or we might have just had an awful call from somewhere and you’re not ready to make some call or deal with it.

Be mindful of that and state boundaries. Also choosing the appropriate first few comments and scripting responses, especially when he got to let people down. Connecting or finding a way to connect with the customer to build rapport with mirroring.

See part two here.