Abusive customers

[yooo]

In our inbound CS call center, there is a new policy that no matter how irate or abusive the customer becomes, an agent is not supposed to release the call. Any complaints of members/customers being hung-up on will be dealt with quickly and may result in immediate separation. I would appreciate if anybody could let me know if this is lawful...i.e. The member can abuse and swear at the agents, and they are supposed to just listen to the abuses and do nothing about it.
Previous policy was that an agent could release a call after 3 warnings to the member to stop using foul language/abuse but now it is not so.

[Saramencia]

I don't know if there is a legislation in USA but how i see it is not as a legal question but a common sense one.

The Mission of CSR and CC at all is to assist costumers and their inquiries, not to listen psychologically abusive costumers.

So, If a costumer became abusive, the CSR must make at least 2 warnings, and if the costumer don't change his attitude, must hang up the most courteously possible, not abruptly, saying something like that:

"Well, Mr. XXXX, as I have told you before, with your attitude (without specifying the kind of attitude: aggresive, abusive, etc.), I will not be able to help you. So I will consider our conversation finished and encourage you to contact my inmediate supervisor if you need any other assitance"

If your company is interested in its HR wellness, they can not force to hear abusive costumers.

Regards,

[bmasc1]

A trained customer service representative should be able to deescalate the call. When a customer utilizes abusive language they should be trained to quickly react with expressing empathy for your customers frustration. Customer just want to vent and unfortunately its the nature of the business (CUSTOMER SERVICE BUSINESS). Two wrongs don't make a right.
In addition, I can see how your company would make a decision to eliminate this type of freedom from your customer service representatives. Unfortunately, some (not all) customer service reperesentatives may have taken advantage of this situation and disconnected for no apparent reason. For instance, what I find offensive may not be offensive to the next representative. Cursing at the situation doesn't mean cursing at the representative. My suggestion to you is not dispute the policy but, encourage your associates to utilize the skills needed to deescalate the call.

[thetuan]

Even though I do agree with the comments posted on this subject, we handle the abusive callers different in our centers. We inform our CSRs that if they feel that their callers are being abusive, please get a floor support member or a team manager to take over the call right away. The floor support team and all of our managers are trained on the six steps methods of "how to handle an abusive caller". At the end of the day, we want to diffuse the anger in the caller and get to the root cause/problem of the caller and hopefully, resolve the call to the satisfaction of the caller. Sometime, the call is beyond repair but we have found that if we are successful in sticking to the process, we can help the caller to resolve his/her issue.

Thanks

[yooo]

Thank you all for your informative feedback. There has been slight change in policy and now if the CSR can't handle an abusive customer, the call needs to be escalated to a Supervisor.
Agent may also undergo a training on how to handle irate customers.