Op-Ed | How to protect your team from abusive client behaviours

I’m often asked about how we grew our business. There’s no hack to achieving success. If washboard abs are your goal, one sit-up won’t do it. You need to consistently put in the effort to see results.

We’re all aware of our industry’s talent shortage. Just like getting physically fit, there isn’t a silver bullet solution to this issue. That said, a good business muscle to develop is prioritizing your team over profit. This shows you have their back, and strengthens teammate satisfaction and retention along with your company’s culture and reputation.

Adopting a customer code of conduct to protect your people from abusive client behaviour is a great exercise to get you started with this.

We had a former client that was incredibly verbally abusive. Eventually, this person threatened to harm our teammates. We discovered this individual had a long history of violence, and that there was a real world risk there.

This was an extreme situation, but it demonstrated the need to better protect our team.

Customer expectations are increasing. When clients believe those standards haven’t been met, they usually target their frustration and anger at frontline teammates. Rising tempers were already a problem prior to the pandemic, and have intensified in the post-COVID world.

As brokers, it’s necessary to always provide professional expertise and service while complying with all regulatory requirements. We’ve developed a customer code of conduct to help our team continue to do this during challenging client interactions.

Everyone deserves a safe place to work, and no one should be screamed at, insulted or threatened while trying to do their job. The code of conduct places the well-being of our teammates at the forefront by clearly outlining expectations for client behaviour and providing transparent steps for conflict resolution.

To help identify when a client is upset versus when behaviour is becoming abusive, we designed a framework for our team with guidance on how to navigate each situation, and when a call should be escalated to a supervisor for additional support.

It’s important that your team, clients and the public know what your business will and won’t stand for – this includes employees not being yelled at and abused. A customer code of conduct helps achieve this.

For anyone that doesn’t have one, ours is downloadable from our website. Feel free to take, use and adapt these guidelines to make them work for you.

Following a customer code of conduct might result in saying goodbye to some revenue from abusive clients. But it’s penny wise, pound foolish to fixate on that. Standing up for your team and looking after their well-being lets them do their job better and avoid burnout.

Excellent clients work with and support great companies. We all know businesses with strong values that treat their people right. Do the exercises to make sure you’re one of these organizations.

Adam Mitchell is CEO of Mitch Insurance, a Whitby, Ont.-based brokerage. He contributes a regular sales column for Canadian Underwriter. 

Feature image courtesy of iStock.com/skynesher

David Gambrill