A Story About Toxic People and How to Deal With Them
By: Andréas Hanss
Tags: Mindset, Customer Experience, Social, Feedback, Psychology

I’ve anonymized the names below for privacy reasons, but you can see Jean as my customer and Patrick as Jean’s customer, the one that “wished” him it’s birthday. This exchange happened on LinkedIn chat.

Let’s start with a bit of context

As a freelancer, I’m working for Jean.

Jean is the CTO of a company that is building an app that allows other companies to organize events and challenges for their employees. Those challenges are delimited within time intervals and there is a kind of ranking during the challenge.

As a CTO, you sometimes have to make things like user support on the app stores and collect feedback from your users in order to improve your product.

As a startup, you’re acquiring a lot of technical debt (while it’s not a goal) to iterate and test the market quickly. This might be due to a lack of knowledge or just time. Some might argue against that postulate and they would probably have nice arguments. I’m one of those: I’m pretty sure it’s always better to build solid software from the beginning. Anyway, it’s not the subject here.

In the goal of improving his software, Jean trusted me to help to refund this technical debt, and at the time I’m writing those lines, we are working hard on a redesign of the matching application. (Just a wink to say that you need to refund this debt somedays :))

Patrick, the customer, is a corporate executive. Therefore he is also competing in his own company challenge with the other employees.

The story: « How to deal with toxic people »

https://www.deviantart.com/tomarmstrong20/art/Wile-E-Coyote-and-Road-Runner-70-years-813512907

I added some comments on that story between stars *like this*. I found that this adds some kind of value :-)

[Patrick] Happy birthday Jean and have a nice day *It starts sweetly* [Jean] Thanks Patrick! You’re the first customer to wish me it today ;) Good luck for this last week of challenge ! [Patrick] You’re welcome Jean 🎂 Thanks for your support. Especially good luck to you as it might not be that simple to handle customer support everyday, with all due respect, of such instable application. *BANG, happy birthday, I guess its the perfect day for such a gift :D* [Jean] A lot of new stuff and change are coming! With alot more of stability! We can’t wait to look forward you all this new stuff! *Smart dodge, with alot of self control*

At this point, the conversation could have just ended, but this would have been too easy… Just not this smart disengage, well played. But sometimes you can do even better, so are toxic people they can go even worst!

[Patrick] It would have to be because a dissatisfied user talk much more than a happy one… *BANG 2, notice those 3 dot* [Jean] Anyway we are very happy and proud about the quality of your challenges that we find very original and well designed. Stay the course for these last two steps! And stay on top of that podium, you deserve it! *Self control demonstation 2*

WOOOH! This guy was really toxic! Why the hell sending such a complaint with a birthday message… Anyway, what can we takeaways from that?

Dealing with toxicity

Something that I learn not so long ago is that: It is the pain we feel that leads us to react inappropriately.

This works in both directions, your customer has pain, so he expresses it to you even if in our case it’s probably not the best way.

But you might also have pain (here the fact that he crushes you freely) and you might react inappropriately.

Jean’s reaction

What I love about Jean's reaction is that he kept control over his feelings. Some people might have just ghosted this guy, responded “thanks”, or counter-attacked.

When I asked him “How are you so tilt proof? I’m really impressed!” he told me “I’m working on it for years, thanks to my little sisters :D”.

The way to react properly is acquired by learning self-control, stepping back thinking about the situation, and practicing.

Transform a complaint about your product into a compliment about the complainer's work.

When you practice that, you could just disengage an attack and this would be ok, it’s already a good reaction to not feed the hate or animosity of other people.

But you can do even better: turn the situation in your favor.

If you expect to play in the political game in the next years, it will be a valuable asset to own 😅.

In the above example, Jean just complimented Patrick and its pairs about something they were doing good within their app usage.

This has two benefits:

You’re not feeding the dispute

You’re flattering the ego of the person and everyone loves being complimented

The results are generally good, the customer generally disengages on its own as this is not a “normal path” to overbid by criticism to a compliment.

As a takeaway, I would say: keep calm and always think about being smarter than the person that is trying to tilt you.

Stick to the facts, focus your attention on what is happening right now, and don’t let thoughts lead to interpretations. Most of the time we are not interpreting things in the way they really are.

We have no enough data to get the whole picture and this results in bad analysis, which leads to bad decisions, like over-reacting.