Dealing with Difficult Customers

A difficult customer is not:

1. Someone who can’t do what you can do. If they could do it on their own, they wouldn’t need to hire you.
2. Someone who doesn’t know exactly what they are trying to accomplish. If a customer is trying to move along a maturity curve, they inherently don’t have experience going along the journey. They hired you because they needed a guide. Unclear requirements are a symptom of this. You’re going to need to staff the project with people who can get to the root of the customer’s needs or wants rather than “gathering” requirements as if they were ripe fruits on a conveniently located blueberry bush.
3. Someone with unrealistic expectations. Again, they haven’t done this before. If you signed a contract with an unrealistic budget or timeline, because you weren’t able to educate them while they were a prospect, the bad outcome is on you, not them.

If either of those situations is frustrating to you, you’re going to be be stuck doing low value work that the customer is outsourcing solely because they lack capacity. They are likely to view it as commodity work. Both your bill rate and your creative fulfillment will suffer accordingly.

The best approach for all of the above is to exercise empathy and patience. As a consultant, you can enjoy the same privilege as a great teacher or coach when you get to watch your clients begin to understand something for the first time, build on that experience, and make it their own.

There are at least three categories of legitimately difficult customers:

1. Those who are not honest, consistent, or transparent. Those are three distinct issues with different causes, but they have a common result. As a vendor, you will constantly struggle to create deliverables that the customer will accept. If you find yourself documenting every meeting in excruciating detail and pulling out those documents to explain why you made particular choices in delivery, you may be in this situation. If you’re faced with this game, the only winning move is not to play. Wrap up the engagement as quickly as you can, refuse to sign another SOW, and pray that they go to your biggest competitor to waste their time instead of yours.
2. The customer who doesn’t understand their own limitations. During the sales cycle they probably told you that they valued your experience and fresh perspective, but when the work starts they want you to follow their processes instead of your own, they want to micromanage the work, and/or they assign “collaborators” who lack the key skills to ensure project success. You need to protect yourself against this situation with clear delivery guidelines in your SOW and an effective early termination clause. You don’t want to use it lightly, but in the handful of situations I’ve seen consultants threaten to invoke it, it triggers the right conversations about whhow to execute the project. Note, however, that if you invoke that option, you better deliver on time and budget with no problems from your end, or your credibility will be eviscerated.
3. The customer who wants to use you as a mercenary in an internal political war. In the DXP world, it used to be far too common to be pulled into a war between marketing and IT. I get the sense that this is less common as marketing departments are relying more on SaaS tools and IT has lost some power. In an era of tighter budgets, I expect that we’ll see a resurgence of IT’s influence along with a return to political battles where consultants are thrust into the middle. While difficult, this can also be a position of great opportunity. The key is good account management that bridges the gap between the rival power centers. If you can wage peace for your client rather than war, you can build a bridge between marketing and IT that replaces conflict with shared goals, a shared vocabulary, and the beginnings of a trusting relationship.