How Should You Deal With Outrage Culture as a Small, Local Business?

Thinking about today’s episode took me back to 2020. It was a hell of a time for brick-and-mortar businesses, in a bad way! You couldn’t say anything about that lockdown period without somebody being mean and nasty about it.

Now, for those who’ve been in business awhile, dealing with outrage culture is nothing new. But it can be dangerous for you as a small, local business. In this episode, I tell you about some of my horror stories dealing with angry customers and cover best practices for handling negative reviews publicly.

3:00 - Two of my experiences with customers from hell

8:30 - The 1st thing to do when someone lashes out at you in a negative review

10:34 - The question to ask yourself next

12:09 - What you need to consider before you respond to the complaint

16:06 - A rule for dealing with those who continue to be outraged and refuse to stop

17:41 - Another useful tip that can take the sting out of the outraged customer or client

18:48 - Benefits of your professional response to an angry complaint (one of them might surprise you)

Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.

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Transcript for How Should You Deal With Outrage Culture as a Small, Local Business?

Hey boss, I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, permanent makeup studios, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries that are too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you’re looking for a woo meets strategy approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul-driven, and of course, pleasurable plan for profitability, then let’s get started.

Hey, party people. It's Leslie, your embodied sales and leadership coach. What y'all doing? How you doing? How are you feeling? I'm doing amazing. Thank you for asking. Oh, my goodness. When I was thinking about the content for this episode, it took me back to 2020. Yes, we all know that was a horrible time for all of us as humanity, right? But I think it was a special kind of hell for us brick-and-mortar businesses. Oh, my goodness, but it just made me think about how angry everybody was.

I remember so many people who don't own businesses, they're not local business owners who are just shocked at how vile and how nasty people could be online and things that people could say, because everybody had an opinion about everything during the lockdown. Everybody was on pins and needles, anxiety was at full bloom, folks were all over the place. We know that. You were probably all over the place. I know I was. But it was like you couldn't say anything without being attacked.

That was everyday people interacting with everyday people, but I don't know about some of y'all, but for me as a local business owner, as somebody who has a brick-and-mortar business, I was like, “Well, welcome to the world of Yelp.” That is now everywhere for us. If you own a small business, you know people flaming you online for sport is nothing new. I felt like while people were passing out and were like, “Oh, can you believe so and so said this?” I felt like I kind of had an edge on these people because I've been dealing with this for over 15 years. Yelp has been around for some time, but before that, it was Google reviews.

Man, I remember this customer, okay, storytime y'all. I had a customer from hell. These people were just vile and evil. Talking about it makes my booty itch. But oh my goodness, these people were in my space. They were rude. They were not a good fit. It was just a mess. I no longer want to serve them as customers so I basically refunded them and sent them on their way. These women were crazy. They were just out of their minds, upset that I had taken them out of the studio.

One of the things that they did back then, so there wasn't a Yelp yet, but what there was were blogs and these chicks went out and they created blogs and they were on message boards just creating subject lines and tagging our business in it to talk about how disappointed they were. Anywho, I'm like, “We've been dealing with outrage culture for a long time. When you go create a platform to complain about somebody, you got to be pretty pissed off.”

As a small business owner though, while I'm laughing about it, I also feel like as local businesses, outrage culture can be dangerous for us. Now in all sincerity, all jokes aside, I've also remembered having stories where, there's one in particular, a woman had put down a downpayment for a private party with our studio. We have a policy that says that all downpayments are nonrefundable for any reason. It's in the contract, you have to initial, you have to sign.

It's very clear that if you flake on us, we're not going to give you your downpayment back because the truth of the matter is we may have lost additional business, someone else could have wanted that spot, we turned them away, and now it's a few days before your event, we're not going to get that money back and we've lost other opportunities to have made that money so that downpayment is nonrefundable.

Well, I remember going through that policy with a particular customer at that time. She had her [inaudible] call up and threaten us. We're a women-owned business. We're dealing with her, next thing we know we get a phone call from a very aggressive man on the call. I'll never forget that I didn't back down what I said to her, to him. But he ended the call with, “Well, I'm going to meet you up there.”

For us, outrage culture can become face-to-face. It’s one thing when you got the keyboard thug, it’s another one when you got an actual thug at your door. I remember being terrified of that. I remember calling my husband. I remember calling the police. But it was just like, “This is insane.”

He was so angry about it and the things that he said to me on the phone and, like I said, the threat to actually come see me in person, all of those things, I was like, “This guy can't be real. I know we are not having this type of conversation over $100 something, this wasn't $100,000, it was $100. I know we're not having this type of conversation about $100.”

Even in that moment, it made me think, “What is this really about?” That's what I want to talk about today. Outrage culture, and how do we deal with that? Because I feel like emotions, like back in 2020, emotions were really high. I feel like people got a lot of stuff going on in their lives. Unfortunately, when things aren't going well at some people's lives, they lash out. We become their punching bags. Your life feels out of control, you lash out on the things that you can control.

Dealing with that personality, dealing with the outrage as a small business owner, you got to come up with a way to deal with that, come up with the system, some tools is a better way to say it, come up with some tools that can keep you cool in these situations. I want to offer a couple today. What do you do when someone is lashing out at you publicly? So they're on Yelp, they're on Facebook reviews, they're on Google reviews they've posted some things, and they are just going to town on you about what your studio, your shop didn't do. They've got a complaint and they want the world to hear it.

The first thing that I do is I take a break when we get negative reviews. I'm sure if you are a successful small business, I know that you aren't getting nasty reviews all over the place because you wouldn't be following me and we wouldn't be engaging in this way. But if you've ever been in business, as my mother always used to say, it's impossible to please everybody, there's got to be someone you let down so you will always have someone who was dissatisfied with your service. It's a part of doing business.

The first thing that I try to do is I try not to take things personally. I pause. I don't respond when I'm angry. It's easy because as small business owners, our business is very personal to us and we’re sensitive about our sh*t because you've put your heart into this, you've put your time into this, you’ve put your resources into this, this means something to you. When someone criticizes it, it feels very personal. You're sensitive towards it.

Give yourself the gift of pause. Give yourself the gift of space, so that you don't respond to say something that you’re going to regret out of anger. I always give myself pause, I give myself a few minutes. I do not respond to negative reviews right away. I give myself that break. In that break as I'm calming down and rereading the review, I always ask myself, “Is there any truth in this review? Is there any truth to what this customer said?”

I operate from that place and it takes some self-awareness and it takes some humility to honestly just ask yourself, “Is there some truth to what was being said?” That will open up empathy, it'll open up the channel of empathy when you go to respond. Because now you've looked at yourself and you want this client to be gracious to you. Your energy changes to being gracious to them because maybe you did mess up.

When you are looking to respond, I always say speak to people how you would want to be spoken to. If you want to calm somebody down, if you got an outrager, if you got a hater, if you've got a disgruntled customer, whatever, this is how you deal with it in a way that keeps your blood pressure low.

When that empathy channel opens up, when you can see where you could have possibly gone wrong, the next thing is to be transparent. Admit that. If you made a mistake, say, “We made a mistake. Give us a chance to make it right.” Own what happened. Don't make excuses. I mean seriously, take a trip down the road and look at how some business owners respond to outrage, how they respond to public outrage. Look at some of these responses.

I can tell you as a small business owner, when I see a small business owner snap back and get that person together, they check that person like super fast or they say something witty, I want to laugh about it. Additionally, I'm like, “Yes, you got them together, child.” But then I think as a customer who doesn't own a business, as someone who's an onlooker at your business, your clever response can be perceived as rude.

This is the next thing I would want to offer you when you're thinking about responding is know that you're not just responding to the complaint. You're responding to the world. Because people are looking at how you're going to respond to customers. When you're thinking about ownership before you can offer any type of solution, that shows humility, that shows a willingness to try to make things right, and that goes a long way for other customers who will be looking.

The other thing that I will say too, is that when you do respond to someone who's mad, angry at the world, and taking it out on you and your business, always respond publicly. Don't take the conversation offline. Don't come in their inbox. Don't not respond and then try to get them a phone call trying to resolve things behind the scenes. Engage with them publicly.

As my mother used to say, I'm going to show up where you show out. While you might be thinking, “Okay, I'm just going to take this conversation down, try to resolve this conversation, help this customer,” all of those things, the world sees you not responding, and that sends a message. So always engage with them publicly. Meaning you start the conversation by apologizing. You start the conversation with empathy the way that you would want someone to handle a complaint by you, which is saying, “I'm sorry. Give me more information. Let's see what we can do to make this right.”

Let them respond to you again. Then you offer to take the conversation offline. Because at that point, when people are outraged, when they're angry and upset, oftentimes, they just want a response. They want some attention. That attention, I always believe that a soft answer could turn away wrath. You don't want to match energy with a disgruntled customer even if they're completely wrong in what they're doing. I'm not a person who feels like the customer's always right and we got to bend over backwards and do backflips. But I used to tell my staff this, “Customers aren’t always right but they always need to be heard.”

By acknowledging them publicly, showing the empathy, you’re showing them that they’ve been heard. For most customers, that's going to take them down a notch so this outrage will drop significantly now that they're engaging. But every now and then we get somebody who's absolutely insane and just angry at the world. Now they won't stop.

I say with those people, you take them to another place, not at a place like you pack them up your truck and move somewhere, but you get them off of Yelp into your email inbox. You never respond to public outrage more than twice because at some point, after you've offered a solution to a person, you have to show that this person is obstinate, they're not being reasonable, and they maybe don't really want a resolution.

But when you start going back and forth with people, from a distance, it looks argumentative and it doesn't [inaudible] well on your business. So don't do it. Take them offline. Make it a rule that after you've responded twice, you don't respond anymore. You close up the conversation, and you move on.

The last thing that I would say is when you're trying to take the sting out of someone who appears to be just outraged is respond back to their complaint with a quick little video. Do the exact same thing that I just said. When someone is just really outraged and they're maybe saying crazy off-the-wall things, humanize the conversation. Because sometimes people will say things behind a keyboard that they would never say to our faces. Sometimes I think people forget that they're not engaging with the machine on the other end of their complaints, but they're engaging with people.

Bringing the humanity back to a situation too can also defuse things. So responding with a quick video of apology, transparency, empathy, and willingness to make this right and you might be surprised how people respond to just being heard. I want to close with this. Never meet outrage without rage. Don't match the client’s energy. That doesn't mean that you're a doormat, that doesn't mean that you're going to let people walk all over you. But it does mean that you are the business and you have more to lose than that customer.

How you handle someone, the professionalism shown could do two things. Number one, it could show future clients that you care. But number two, it might turn a hater into a repeat customer. You'd be surprised how you might be able to win a customer back just by how you respond.

Meet outrage with grace. That's what I say. Put yourself in the shoes of that person. Look to see if there's something you can learn. Because you know what, some of the best changes that I've made in my business came from a customer complaint. What could be possible if we start looking at complaints as gifts, as an opportunity for us to get better? Because when we know when we get better, we become more profitable. Alright, my loves. Until next time, y'all be well. Grace and peace.