Dealing with Difficult Clients

How do you deal with difficult clients?  99% of clients who come in our door are happy to be there, and just as nice as they can be.  Then we get that other 1% that I’d just like to choke!  Since my practice is in a small town where news travels faster than the speed of sound, you just have to bite your tongue most of the time.  Here are a couple of examples:

A woman called for an appointment and said that she had a gift certificate for sixty dollars.  I explained that was for an hour of massage.  She made the appointment, and when she arrived, informed me that she wanted to break that up into four fifteen minute sessions.  I politely told her she hadn’t said that on the phone and therefore the therapist had booked her for an hour.  She quickly became very rude and said that the next time, she’d tell her husband to get her a gift certificate somewhere else.  I remained polite in spite of my urge to wring her neck.  The therapist turned out to be just what she’d been looking for, and she ended up purchasing a package deal for fifteen minute sessions, but it was a rocky start to our business relationship.

I am blessed with a staff of great therapists who are usually booked well in advance.  There are always those clients who never book in advance; they just call when they wake up and can’t turn their head and want to be taken care of right then.  One client who is notorious for doing just that called last week.  I offered to put her on our cancellation list.  During the course of the week, I called her on three different occasions, could only get through to her voice mail, and left her the message that I was willing to hold the appointment for half an hour and that I would then be calling to offer it to someone else.  She called back on all three of those occasions after I had given away the appointment.  The third time, she rudely said that  I should be able to accommodate walk-in clients.  I replied that my therapists weren’t willing to give up their steady appointments in order to sit around and take a chance that someone might walk in, and that all of our treatment rooms were filled with people who had booked in advance.  She was very huffy about it.  I referred her to another therapist in town who is just starting out and suggested that she might have better luck getting in with her on the spur of the moment.  She was incredulous that I was trying to send her somewhere else.

My 20-plus years in the restaurant business have given me plenty of experience in customer service, but thinking back on that I remember plenty of times when I wanted to dump someone’s plate on their head!  I never did that, although I was sorely tempted.  It’s better to take the high road and let the customer be the one who’s behaving badly.

I’d love to hear some of your stories about difficult clients and how you rose to the occasion.