We’ve all had those moments when trying to get good service or a refund from a company and we can’t seem to get anywhere. Either the customer service reps haven’t been empowered to solve your problem or they are just borderline incompetent. So what do you do?

It can feel great to just get angry and yell at the reps. I’ve certainly taken that approach at times. Which can sometimes work but often doesn’t yield as good of a result as you could be getting.

Recently, I had the displeasure of having a miserable service experience with a company that I was paying several thousand dollars. The short of it was that they suffered from an inability to communicate and keep their commitments. They also overcharged me by nearly $700!

I’m not going to go into who they are because I’m happy with the end result and the objective of this post is to talk about how to work with difficult service organizations, not my one experience.

My result: I was able to get the service level I needed, a refund of my $700 and a 25% discount off the total I had spent.

Let me teach you how to do it.