Why clients fire you.

If you’re an American football fan, and if you watch the cable network ESPN, you likely have seen the show Monday Night Countdown, where the program’s hosts each will describe a play or series of plays that made them scratch their heads and say “C'Mon Man!” to an outlandish or unimaginable situation.  

Hold that thought for a moment; I will return to it in a minute after making my point. 

It’s a challenge to find a way to effectively describe the nearly 300 pages of the latest, third edition of The Art of Client Service in a workshop that lasts a little more than an hour, but I this is what I’ve been able to do with a session called Five Ways to Build Trust with Clients and Colleagues. 

One of those five ways is called “Follow Up:” if a client calls, you call back; if a client emails, you email back. There’s a bit more to the story than this, but it’s a simple, self-evident, easy-to-execute principle. 

Recently I conducted a Five Ways session as part of a workshop I was asked to lead; the firm I was working with videotaped my presentation so they could share the result with others who were unable to attend that day. I am totally supportive of this – it’s an easy and affordable way to extract more value from what I share – my only request is the firm share the result with me too, so I can see how badly or how often I screw up, viewing the result with three parts dread and one part narcissistic impulse. 

That workshop ended a couple of months ago, with still no video in sight, I reached out to a contact at the firm to see what’s up. No answer. I write a second time. This time, I get a response; here is what my contact said: 

“I thought I responded, though things get lost!  

“Our videographer is finishing up the video this week and said he would get it to us by Friday. Once they’re here, I’ll upload them to our file transfer so that you can have full size files.  

“Thanks!”  

It was if this person wasn’t in the room while I spoke, or heard my advice and ignored or rejected it, but there are three things flat wrong with what he sent me: 

• The first is not responding to my initial email. 
• The second is making excuses: “I thought I responded.” 
•  The third is lying about it: “things get lost!” 

Point one: it never should happen; you don’t ghost people. It takes like, two seconds, to write a fast response, so why not do it? 

Point two: don’t ever say, “I thought I responded.” That is a completely lame excuse, and not in any way believable. Instead, say, “My apologies,” or, “I’m sorry,” to acknowledge a mistake that should not happen.  

Point three: don’t lie. My email didn’t get lost; the person on the receiving end ignored it, thinking, I suspect, it wasn’t worthy of a response. 

Okay, so maybe I don’t matter to this person. I’m not a client, I’m not a colleague, but behavior is behavior. Some people will say it’s a millennial problem. It’s not. It’s a stupidity problem. 

This is what dooms a relationship, with clients, with colleagues, with me.   

C’mon man! 

Clients rarely will complain about seemingly trivial stuff like this – they’ll focus on the seemingly big things, like the work or the money – but you want to know why they become exasperated and angry? Why they fire their agencies? 

This is why.