Customer Service & De-escalation Help from Myra Golden

There is a customer in my training room who does not exist. She joins the breakout room already hot, a 5 out of 5 on my intensity scale. She talks over the agents, demands a supervisor, and threatens to take it public. The four people in the room have one job: bring her from a 5 down to a 1, toget...

It is the call you brace for. The customer is shouting before you finish your greeting, the words are sharp and personal, and every instinct says defend yourself or rush to a fix. In a call center, that moment decides the entire interaction. De-escalation is the skill that turns it around, and i...

The industry calls them AI agents. I call them an AI workforce. That is not a small distinction, and I want to start here, because the word you choose shapes how your team feels walking into this change.

When you say "AI agents," your frontline hears "the thing ...

You are mid-shift. A customer is hot. The chat window is blinking, the phone line is live, or the email is sitting there in all caps, and you have about ten seconds to say something that lowers the temperature instead of raising it. You know how to de-escalate angry customers over chat, phone, a...

In live chat, you don't have your voice to soften the message. There's no warm tone, no pause, no reassuring "mm-hmm." The customer reads your words flat on a screen, and an angry customer reads them at their worst. So the words you choose carry the whole weight of the de-escalation. These 27 ph...