Most retail workers will tell you that the worst part of retail is the customers. Which is true. The job is monotonous and physically exhausting in itself, but dealing with people is often difficult. Customers have the tendency to feel extremely entitled. So when things don't go their way, they can turn pretty sinister.
Thankfully I never had a ton of angry customers to deal with. I dealt with 5 at most over the year-ish I worked at my store. That's pretty good for retail. Certain stores have a tendency to attract horrible customers, and ours wasn't really one of them.
Your first angry customer is always going to rattle you. It comes as a shock and you tend to take it personally. You're not exactly equipped to deal with it either; in interviews, managers will ask you how you would react to an angry customer, and you can say "stay calm" all you want, but what do you actually say to get the customer thinking rationally and calm down? Here are some tricks I developed after saying the wrong things that made customers more mad. This works for anyone angry, to be honest.
1. Act like it's your fault
Acting like it's your fault is often the underlying key to making a customer calm down. It's what they want, right? For you to acknowledge that their own ignorance is your complete and total fault? If you can satisfy that condition for them, then you're actually getting them on your side. This includes a lot of apologizing and making sympathetic facial expressions.
2. Don't answer questions; state facts
When angry, customers like to ask direct, aggressive questions. Never answer these questions with a direct "yes" or "no". It's going to make them more upset because they'll immediately feel more justified for being irrational. What's better is to state facts surrounding their question so that they arrive at their own conclusion. This is a far more effective method to calm them down. If they use their own thinking to answer the question, they begin to be more logical and easier to work with.
example (true story):
Customer: "I drove all the way here from (insert ridiculously far city) for a gold-colored cardigan I saw online."
(who the fuck buys a gold-colored cardigan???)
Me: *sympathetic facial expression* "We don't actually have cardigans in gold right now. We have other colors..."
Customer: *aggressive* "But it SAID you guys had them online. Do you SERIOUSLY not have any gold cardigans?"
At this point I could be direct and say no. However, this is bad. It supports her anger. Here is where I began to state facts and offer a solution.
Me: *most sympathetic facial expression* Our online system is sometimes not consistent with the store inventory (fact #1). We get shipment every week (fact #2), so it's possible they may arrive later. Also, sometimes there are online-exclusive colors (fact #3). I can call another store and see if they have it or order it online for you (fact #4,5 and solution).
Notice how the facts allowed her to conclude herself that we didn't have what she wanted. The most important thing is to only state facts and never offer your opinion here. If you say something like "gold would be a really hard color to work with anyway", that's going to make them more upset because you are, in essence, telling them they are wrong on so many levels. That they're wrong for liking the color gold, they're wrong for looking it up online, they're wrong for driving 30 miles to buy it, etc. Also, keep talking and stating facts. Never give them complete silence for too long or else you're giving them time to fume.
At the same time, another thing to note is to not be too logical. The more you act like a machine, mentally, when talking to a customer, the more annoyed they get. They want to see that you care about their issue. You do this through a hell of a lot of fake sympathy.
3. Say things that emphasize that you are their servant
Notice how in the previous example I said "[...] or order it online for you." That phrase works wonders. It makes customers feel like you are working for them, not against them, even though they might not be getting what they want. It feeds their sense of entitlement, which also calms them down.
That's my general formula I used to work with angry customers. It got me out of tough situations pretty well without ruining the customer's loyalty to the store. Everybody develops their own way of working with the difficult customers, but it's critical that you never attack them in any way because they're already feeling attacked that you don't have a cardigan in gold.
