A note on an account can say a great deal in very few words.
“Customer aggressive on call.”
It may be completely accurate. It might also be the only thing the next person reads.
What the note usually doesn’t say is why the customer was angry. That part tends to live somewhere else, if it’s recorded at all: across earlier contacts, in a promise that wasn’t kept, or in the customer’s own account of what happened, which nobody may have asked for.
Once anger has been recorded as the problem, it can quietly replace the problem that produced it.
Anger is easy to see
There’s a reason this happens, and it isn’t necessarily that anyone is being unfair.
Anger is immediate. It’s on the line, and somebody has to deal with it there and then. The cause is often harder to see. It may sit in a different team, an earlier contact, a system or a decision made months ago.
So the thing that’s visible gets the attention. Staff are trained to de-escalate, calls are reviewed for how the adviser handled a difficult customer, and policies set out what happens when behaviour becomes unacceptable. All of that can be sensible.
But it’s possible for an organisation to become very good at managing anger while getting no better at preventing whatever is causing it.
The label travels
Once someone has been identified as difficult, that can shape every contact that follows.
The next adviser may approach the call more cautiously, or more defensively. Calls might be kept shorter. Requests can be read as demands, persistence as unreasonable, and a raised voice as confirmation of what the note already said.
None of that requires anyone to be acting in bad faith. People reasonably prepare for what they’ve been told to expect.
The difficulty is what this can do to the customer. If they’re already frustrated because their problem hasn’t been sorted, and they’re now being handled as a risk rather than helped as a customer, the frustration is likely to grow. Which then appears to confirm the label.
It can become a loop, where the organisation’s response to the customer’s anger produces more of it, and each round makes the original problem harder to see.
Anger and credibility
There’s another, quieter effect. When a complaint is investigated, the customer’s account and the organisation’s account are often weighed against each other. If the customer was angry and the adviser stayed calm, it can be very easy, without anyone deciding to, for the calm account to seem the more reliable one.
But how someone sounded isn’t evidence of whether they’re right. A furious customer can be entirely accurate about what happened to them. A calm, professional account of a contact can still miss what went wrong, particularly if the person giving it only saw their own part.
If tone starts to stand in for credibility, the customers most affected by a failure can end up being the least believed about it.
Persistence isn’t always unreasonable
Many organisations have policies for contact that becomes excessive or unreasonably persistent. There are good reasons for that. Some people do contact services in ways that are disproportionate, and staff time is finite.
But it’s worth asking why someone keeps getting in touch.
Sometimes it’s because the problem keeps not being solved. They were told someone would call back and nobody did. They were told it was sorted and it wasn’t. They may have learnt, through experience, that the only way anything happens is if they chase it.
In that situation, persistence isn’t necessarily the customer being unreasonable. It may be the customer doing the only thing that has ever worked.
If the organisation then treats the persistence as the issue, it has, in effect, penalised the customer for compensating for its own failures.
Anger carries information
Anger isn’t proof that the organisation has done something wrong. But it is information. It can be a signal that something needs looking at, rather than simply something that needs calming down.
Sometimes the intensity points to repetition, broken promises, or effort the organisation didn’t realise it was asking for. Sometimes it doesn’t. But you can only tell which by looking.
If those calls are only ever reviewed for how the adviser coped, that information goes nowhere.
Protecting staff
None of this means staff should have to put up with abuse. Threats, personal insults and discriminatory language aren’t something anyone should accept as part of the job, and organisations are right to protect people from them.
But protecting staff from anger and asking what’s producing it aren’t competing priorities. If anything, reducing the failures that keep making customers angry may be one of the better ways to protect staff.
An organisation that only addresses the behaviour is likely to find itself addressing it again, with a different customer and a different adviser, for the same underlying reason.
What gets recorded
Which brings it back to the note.
“Customer aggressive on call” might be true. But on its own, it records the reaction rather than the cause, and it’s the cause that will still be there for the next customer.
The anger was a result.
The question is what it was a result of.
Karen Ferguson investigates why problems in human-facing services keep happening. Her background is in human behaviour and communication, and she has designed, built and adversarially tested conversational AI systems. Problems she has identified and pursued have led to process changes in an NHS trust, a police force and a national charity.