If you have customers, you will sometimes have difficult customers; this is a reality of life as much as business: Sometimes, people are difficult. Sometimes, people are terrible. And sometimes these difficult people are our paying customers. So how do you handle challenging ones?

There’s a popular saying in the US — most popular of all amongst consumers themselves — that the customer is always right. That slogan gained popularity and traction in the 1940s, in part as a response the prevailing wisdom of the day: caveat emptor, or buyer beware.

The expression sounds great on its face, and again, customers sure love to flaunt it when they feel aggrieved. But with any prodding at all, of course, the customer is always right makes no sense at all. No one is always right. We make mistakes.

Other languages use different versions of this expression. In French, they say the customer is never wrong, which feels a lot like the same message, but to my ear carries a little bit of quintessential French shade. If the customer is always right, they should get what they want. If the customer is never wrong, they sound… high maintenance.

In German, the expression is the customer is king. There’s a bit of snark there, too: A king is unelected, rules by fiat, and just gets to decide, whether right or wrong. This is not the customer I want.

Japan goes a step further still. The equivalent Japanese expression is the customer is a god. Okay then.

But in Spanish and Italian, the expression they use about customers resonates with me. In those languages, the motto used is the customer always has a reason.

I like that. The customer always has a reason.

Intellectually, we know this. If a customer is angry or difficult or heated — even a customer we know without a doubt is wrong — we also know that the customer has a reason they’re feeling the way they are. There’s a reason they think the things they think.

We might not agree with that reason. We might not find it reasonable. But in our best moments, we know the customer has a reason, that their anger/behavior/word choice/tone is motivated by some specific things they’re experiencing.

Of course, that the customer has a reason doesn’t excuse or defend their anger/behavior/word choice/tone. But it explains it.

But it’s only in our very best moments that we can always remember this truth, that the customer has a reason. It’s hard, in real time, to remember and to leverage the knowledge that the customer has a reason when we’re feeling triggered by their lousy behavior.

It sometimes feels impossible to empathize with difficult customers. Even when that’s a challenge, though, the best trick to dealing with these folks is to at least understand why they’re thinking the way they are. We have to find the customer’s reason for acting the way they are.

Sometimes when a customer requests feature X, it’s because they want feature X. Makes sense. But sometimes a request for feature X means that they really want feature Y, or that don’t even realize feature Z exists.

The real magic when dealing with a difficult customer is understanding their reason, and to find ways to explain why they’re wrong — without ever making them acknowledge (or even aware of) their wrongness. Very often, anger masks confusion or uncertainty. A yelling customer is likely one who doesn’t know or understand something, and that’s a vulnerable feeling, and most of us don’t like feeling vulnerable — especially in a work setting.

Figuring out and understanding the angry customer’s reason doesn’t mean you cave, give in, or sacrifice. It’s knowledge you use to shape your approach with that customer, to better frame how you handle your response.

Even though the customer isn’t always right, it’s a near certainty that the customer always thinks they’re right. Your job is to figure out why a difficult customer thinks they’re right, and to resolve a solution without that difficult customer ever having to feel wrong.

It’s not easy. And it can’t sound faked or forced; we’ve all been annoyed at the customer service rep who shares phony-sounding platitudes. So it’s worth working to funnel your own frustration at a difficult customer into Big Detective Energy, making it your job to figure out why they’re upset — and then use those insights to get them back on the right path. Angry customers who feel heard and understood stop being angry — even if the end result isn’t what they initially had in mind.

Because they’re human. What they really want is just that — to be heard and understood.