1. Diagnosis

Agent has a fear of competent customers with precise requests.

2. Behaviour Observations

What you might see or hear that points to this pattern.

• The agent is accusing customers of being aggressive, but your experience is of competence.
• The agent is continually putting off talking to this customer (outbound calls).
• The agent is becoming very defensive of the institution when the customer is not so unreasonable.

3. Session Objective

Sometimes staff will come across very clever and competent customers who know what they want and have a good story about why their request is reasonable. The offer the staff member should make is to be a facilitator of their request into the organisation. To make that offer they need to learn to submerge their ego.

4. Session Tactics

How to prepare for and structure the 45-minute call review.

Step 1: Help the staff member come to terms with how they feel when they meet this type of person. Talk about smart people they have worked with before and what was good about them. Step 2: Be clear on your offer — clarity on your role and power is particularly important (platforming). Step 3: For this type of customer, get commitments clear and mutual: what will you do, what will they do, when will it all be done.

5. GROW Experiments

Experiments the coachee might choose to try. These are offers, not prescriptions — the coachee selects what feels right for them.

Behaviour Tags