Grieving Customers Dealing with Data Loss

From the front page of the Washington Post: Repair Teams Try to Calm 'Computer Rage' (requires free registration). The article is an example of the importance of dealing with customers’ feelings in addition of the technical issues that originated the service transaction. The customers in this case are computer users that have lost all their data in their crashed computers (been there, done that)

Here’s an excerpt:

The challenge is to recognize which of the five stages of grief -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance -- a given customer is in, and respond accordingly.

A customer service rep also needs to be a counselor.