I recently attended an event for one of my biz buddies, Britt Seva – a stellar business coach for hairstylists, called Thrivers Live. One thing that really resonated with me that one of the speakers spoke about was having EMPATHY in how you handle the clients in your business. 

It’s totally normal when we feel like somebody’s upset with us or we feel threatened to go on the defensive and try to protect ourselves by making the client out to be wrong or that we’re the wronged party – but this approach to running your business doesn’t solve anything – and often times ends up back firing on you and your business. So today I’m going to give you a different perspective on handling upset clients – and that is by using empathy.

So what is empathy? My definition is understanding somebody else’s perspective, and being able to put yourself in their shoes to understand why they are the way that they are – or why they behave the way that they behave. 

I find that especially in today’s culture, and especially in the beauty industry, a lot of business owners lack empathy – they tend to go straight to VICTIM, or they go to BLAME. When you’re blaming somebody, you’re acting as the victim like, “they’ve wronged me, I need to attack”. 

So I’ll give you an example of what this might look like. When a client gets unhappy – It’s usually caused by two factors – either they don’t like the results, OR they didn’t  like the experience. Depending on their comfort level of communicating with the business on their undesired results or experience will determine how they feel they can be heard. Sometimes that means contacting you and giving you the opportunity to fix the error and sometimes that means putting you on blast online by way of a bad review and telling anyone who will listen about their results/experience.

So let’s use the online review. You get the notification. It’s probably not a convenient time for you, when you’re in a good mental health space, ready to take on whatever comes your way. NOPE.  It’s likely you’re distracted or already overwhelmed, you go read the review and it’s tearing you apart. You go into what’s called “fight or flight” – your heart rate starts picking up, your mind starts racing, you start going into fear, maybe you’re breathing faster. It’s ANXIETY.  

It’s likely you feel threatened by this bad review because now, what was a personal experience between you and a client is now being shared with others. 

This leads you to thoughts like, “oh my god, what is this going to do to my business?” If you’re not completely aware of the thoughts and how to manage and navigate your thoughts, you probably go into a spiral of negativity of:  

• What if other people read this?
• I’m going to lose business!
• My business is going to shut down!
• This is going to destroy me! 

And if we are not present to being able to control our thoughts, we very easily go down this negative mindset path. If you don’t have a whole lot of emotional regulation or are even aware that you can control your emotions and calm yourself down, that you’re in an anxious state, you tend to react in that state rather than wait till you physically calm down.

You just react, fight or flight.  Those of you that react by responding back to that client with some equal level of hate and aggression or trying to put all the blame on the client, remember this:

We live in an online world, as soon as you put something online, it can FOREVER be online.

Even if you delete it right away – if she saw it, took a screenshot of it, there’s no going back from that. Not to say that you can’t recover, not to say that people haven’t been canceled and then uncancelled. But when you react out of emotion, you’re not using logic. 

If you get criticism by way of a negative review, and all you want to do is hide and stay in your room with the covers over your head, you tend to default to a flee response. You just don’t want to deal with it. Those of you that like to attack back and hurt that person that hurt you, you tend to go more towards a fight response. Either way, is not conducive to getting you the result you want. So I want to offer you a perspective shift that you can use when this type of situation happens. Because inevitably, the more clients you have, you’re going to have somebody who is going to be upset. 

So why would someone leave a bad review? Well, likely there was an expectation that they had coming in, that wasn’t met, but I want to go even deeper on that. Think about what it is that you do. What is the result somebody is looking for? When we’re in the beauty industry, what we are doing is affecting how someone views themselves in the world and how other people view them. It’s a very, very personal thing. So every time they look in a mirror, they see you. Every time they take a picture, they are reminded of you. Every time they are talking to someone, they are aware of where that person’s eyes are going, and if they’re focusing on a certain point.

That’s kind of the addictive piece of what you offer – if you do it well, and they feel beautiful, sexy, and confident – they’re hooked, they’re addicted. But if you mess up just a little bit, they’re going to be constantly thinking about you because they don’t feel confident, sexy, or beautiful. Can you imagine what that experience might feel like? Especially if they already came in feeling ugly, not beautiful, not desirable, not attractive. That has nothing to do with you, but they’re looking to you to fix that problem. 

So this is where empathy comes in because at some point, all of us have felt undesirable, unattractive, or ugly. A lot of people won’t even step foot outside without looking a certain way. So if you’ve jacked up their lashes, if they look really awful, or they just don’t FEEL like they look good – even though you’re like, the work is flawless, it looks beautiful, I did exactly what you said – they’re not going to be happy. I mean, how do you feel when you don’t feel beautiful? And can you imagine what that would feel like if SOMEBODY DID THAT TO YOU? That’s what they’re thinking.  They feel like you have threatened their ability to be attractive and presentable in the world, they’re then going to react out of emotion and try to hurt you back in the only way that they feel they can to get your attention or to hurt you. 

It’s a pretty powerful thing to mess with somebody’s appearance. And that’s what you’ve signed up for.

Most of the time, what we offer makes women feel beautiful, especially with eyelash extensions. But when they start to feel ugly, and they start to feel unattractive, it brings out some not so pleasant responses. You’ll have some clients that just won’t won’t ever talk to you again, they won’t come back because they didn’t like how they looked. Then you have some clients that like to make sure that they got your attention, and that you were going to pay for the way that you made them look and feel. So when we have that perspective of what the clients experience is like when they go to do something that seems really aggressive and hurtful by leaving a bad review, you can use empathy to help you get the result that you want. 

Obviously, the ideal result is that the client left happy and felt beautiful.  Sometimes we’re gonna miss the mark, and that’s okay. How do we still have an interaction with anybody in our lives from a place of empathy? By putting yourself in their shoes and taking ownership of what your role was in their experience. You don’t have to take the full blame and the full responsibility, but you can defuse someone’s fight or flight response when they feel heard, or they feel understood.

And you can still have boundaries.  You don’t have to keep them as a customer, especially if they’re being nasty to you. But I think having empathy would make the world a better place in your business.

If you can come from a place of empathy, of “I’m so sorry that this service didn’t meet your expectations.  I can tell you’re still upset, please let me know if there’s anything I can do. I totally understand that we didn’t meet your expectations and we’re reviewing our processes. Thank you so much for your feedback”.  Because that’s all it is – it’s just FEEDBACK.  The more weight you put on it, and the more meaning you put onto a bad review, the more it’s going to control your own emotional state.  It’s not the ideal experience, and we’re looking into how we can fix our client experience so that this doesn’t happen again. 

Because 99% of your clients you should never have to fire.  You should never have to put these boundaries in place because the expectations are set from the get go. My challenge to you is to try to come from a place of empathy to make sure that what your business is doing is actually creating more positive and more good than it is negative and bad. 

If you’re struggling with having empathy in your business or have no clue where to even start – send me a DM at www.instagram.com/thelashpreneur and let’s chat! 

Episode Highlights:

What is empathy? 

The downward spiral that can happen when you get a negative review.

The perspective shift that is a game-changer in how to handle upset clients.