Customer Care & De-Escalation Skills Learning

The VP of Human Resources at a large property management firm, with more than 500 staff members across twelve large residential communities located in various states, sought help with emotionally-charged customer interactions. Property staff members were regularly challenged with a number of escalated conflicts, including rising renewal rates, unexpected move-out costs, ongoing maintenance issues, and volatile neighbor disputes. After a couple of particular situations spiraled out of control and ended up in legal turmoil, the company recognized their team members needed more effective techniques for de-escalation and customer care.

We met with senior property staff and community managers to discover some of the main hot-button topics that regularly led to escalated customer interactions. Based on that information, we customized our training workshop to include custom practice scenarios to create a highly relevant and effective workshop for property staff. We then delivered this interactive, instructor-led training workshop in-person at the company’s annual retreat to multiple cohorts of team members. Each cohort participated in a 4-hour workshop, covering:

• De-escalation Skills for Customer Care
• Self-Regulation and Emotional Self-Management
• Pre-Escalation Strategies for Hot-Button Topics
• Open discussions on how to apply these skills in real-world scenarios
• Multiple skillset practices, learning tests, and roleplay

• More than 200 property staff trained, including customer-facing team members and senior leadership
• Training satisfaction reported at an average of 96% (Highly Satisfied) across multiple measurements
• Skillset tests improved by 63%, indicating that retention of the material was high and the capacity to apply it greatly increased
• 8-week post-training check revealed customer-facing property staff felt much more comfortable handling tense customer interactions
• Company reported fewer incidents rising to corporate, with increasingly more being solved at the property level