Dealing with difficult clients!

Have you ever had a hard time dealing with difficult clients? This is my day-to-day, it can happen any day and it can well, drive you to the edge.

Still, I’ve spent most of my time building my business, enjoying new projects and taking Spiderz ahead, one day at a time, avoiding all the madness.

Enter the crackpot!

Every now and then your client would hire, how do I put this mildly, a crackpot. Now, we’ve all had our fair share of crackpots at work, but this is someone who just nailed their job and is out there to conquer the world. Or it’s that six-month probation thingy most companies follow here as the norm, or something. These new recruits are out there to prove a point, that they’ve arrived on the stage and that the rest of the world as it exists, doesn’t anymore.

I’ve got tons of experience in having met, or heard from, such crackpots. Right from day one, back in 2003, for a close client of mine, I had to reply to this chap who insisted we had used multiple technologies to build their website. He boldly listed them, HTML, Javascript and Coldfusion, and asked in a concerned tone why we didn’t use just one language. I had my client and his spouse sitting in front of me, with a couple of others from their team, or else I would have burst out laughing.

They come stinging at you.

There was this other guy, who came at me stinging, asking as to why we hold captive domain names we register for our clients. Now, we never do this, but I can vouch for the fact that in the UAE, this practice has been prevalent. The web developer you hire registers your domain name, is happy that you’re his new client, until things don’t work out and you want to move away. At that point, getting the domain back becomes a real issue. Most such web developers or teams take it emotionally rather than professionally. So I replied to him, listen, we don’t do this, and that I’m only speaking to you to make the process simple for you, and we did.

The issue is, sometimes, they lose all context as well. The client who wanted their domain name moved away to this chap was a law firm. If anyone can get what they own back from anyone scrupulous, it should be a law firm. And of all things, that’s the context, your client is a law firm, relax. Still, it’s the same attitude. I’ve just scored this client, he’s mine and I’m going to take it all. Not far from the guy who wants to iron his job in, this chap wanted to iron his client in. Anyway, another crackpot.

Sometimes, they’re absolutely incorrect.

I hesitate to say wrong, because wrong would mean they don’t know their stuff, but you have to have the ability to look through their absurdness. There was this lady who was the company’s HR manager, and she simply seemed to hate me. I’m not sure why.

Their general manager was from the same ethnicity as mine, so I only wondered. It could have been my owning an iPhone at the time in early 2008 or my being an independent, young business owner. I’m not sure what, but it was a jesting match for her! A comment here, a comment there. I felt she was unnecessary to the project. What does an HR manager have to do with the company’s website? Zilch. And by the way, she pronounced content as ‘condent’, so it gave me a few chuckles.

Still, I’ve had a lot of patience when it comes to this stuff. Interestingly, she went on vacation, and we completed the project during that time. On her return, she remarked that if she were there, this site wouldn’t have launched. The company’s director, a close relative of my uncle and partner at the time, appointed me. I couldn’t have cared less about what their employees said or did. We did our job and did it well.

They love seeing you wag your tail.

If it’s a bone, you’ve got to see it coming. Some people do this, oh, if just this time you give us this massive discount or favor, we’re going to send the world towards you, measured in gold and silver. It’s a bone that you’ll never get to bite, so you’ve got to see where it’s coming from. By that, I mean who’s the chap offering. I had this guy say something like this a couple of years ago, so I pressed him on it with a few more questions.

How soon were they planning the next project? Had he spoken to his boss about it (I knew the owner’s name, so I used it)? Was there a budget for this? When I didn’t get a clear answer, I mentioned to him that he was simply trying to promise something that wasn’t even there. You have to see whether the bone’s even there when they wag it at you, or they’ll have your tail wagging for them, ad infinitum.

He designed two thousand websites on his own?!

Some of my clients host their websites with us, while their in-house or outsourced teams develop websites for them. So this new chap joins one of my clients as a web development expert of some kind and calls me demanding something. A discussion ensues, and I say this lightly, but the remark he makes really makes me laugh, for real this time. To prove his credentials, he says he designed about two thousand websites back home. I desist from mentioning his country.

Oh my, really? As someone who’s done this work for eons, I only wondered what would be the quality of those websites, and my, my, what was this, a slog house you were working at? I got him back to the point and calmed him down.

He wants to speak to so and so…

The problem with phone calls or messages is, you don’t see the chap in front of you. Neither do they, so things can get a little carried away. More so with this uncouth, raw, creaky lot who bluster, ‘I want to speak to so and so!’ Okay, this isn’t the right day to be hearing this. I’ve got stuff going on, I wonder to myself. Still, he’s representing my client, so what’s this about? I try to take the conversation forward.

The next sentence, instead of speaking to me, is, ‘Is it that hard for you to get me to speak to so and so?’ Now I’m wondering, are you calling so and so at my company? Or you’ve got my number from someone at yours and I ain’t so and so? So? I politely inquire as to what seems to be the issue. He does tell me, then by the sounds of it, I get the whiff of it, this chap seems to be new. So I ask him, are you new?

The answer is in the affirmative, so I say, listen, you can email your request to our support address. We’ll take care of it right away. He desists this, so I say politely, you’re speaking to the right guy, and that your team can even connect with us tomorrow, since he says the lady handling this is not at work today. Somehow, he wants to handle it himself. But here’s the problem, he’s trying to coordinate a support issue we had raised with them a day or two earlier!

Our security suite that runs on all servers, Imunify360, had identified a rogue plugin on their website, and we had opened a ticket asking them to have their web development team address this. So we were in the know. Still, a guy’s got to cement his position, after all, he’s new. Anyway, in business, remember, this kind of call can come on days when you’re going through some of the toughest moments of your life. Yet, you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball and play it well.

The chap who says I need this yesterday is the risky one.

He’s got no idea of timelines or of time itself. This isn’t a phrase. It’s an alert! I’ve mostly found people who say this are effectively deflecting my question. When do you want this ready? Or how soon do you see your website going online?

Yesterday!?!

The key here is to assess how involved they want to be from the get go. If you get a reply saying, ‘I want this yesterday.’ And no meaningful information thereafter, make an informed guess. You’re either going to have someone who leaves everything on you, the bitter parts that drag a project, which is good.

Or you’re going to have to deal with hell because they have no clue what’s involved. With no real yardstick to measure success, the yardstick is in their hand and they’ll herd you. Thankfully for me, I’ve always added a buffer cost to such projects, and it either helps you cover the added time, or you simply don’t get the job. Don’t lose money over someone else’s lack of attention or detail.

If they’re furious, listen.

A lovely, lovely client of mine, who greatly respects me and is one of our VIP clients, called me in Ramadan the first year I took his project. He was furious at this British lady who had designed his storefront and wouldn’t help give him the logo files. Since this was Ramadan, and I was fasting, and he was fasting, or so I assumed, I politely said, it’s Ramadan, so let’s calm down.

To that, he blurted that he was not fasting, to which I don’t attest or can, and won’t, so I kept quiet for a moment. Then I said, how about this, I need the logo to complete the site, so I’ll speak to this British lady and see if she entertains me. Certainly, she wasn’t entertaining him, most likely because of his tirade or something. He agreed and shared her number.

I was driving at the time, I recall vividly, and she picked up the phone. My accent is clearly Pakistani when I speak English, and hers was British, but from the whiff of it, I knew she wasn’t ethnically British, just someone who had acquired an accent and now sounded, how do I put this, ‘dangerous.’ I explained to her my client’s pain and asked her to share the logo, if that was possible.

She said straight out no, and I know why. Most designers don’t really design a logo. They do stuff on their graphics programs and finish their main job. In her case, she would have sent the logo to my client’s storefront designer and that was about it. I explained my pain again. My project is stuck because there is no logo! She still said no, but during this while, I kept appealing to her ego. Listen to what they’re saying, and then reverb anything they’ve added to the conversation, positively. Then too, know what you want from them. I could have ended the phone call, said, okay, we have a problem, but I knew what, as a minimum, I needed.

When all looked lost, I said, will it be possible for you to look up the name of the font and just tell me? That’ll help me out. ‘Okay, let me see, here it is!’ Wow! I got the font name, and beyond that point, my path was clear! I could finish my client’s site! So I thanked her and then called my client to say I got the font name, and that this helps me get on with the site work, and that he can rest assured we’re here for him. This was back in 2011, and my client is still with us. I still keep my cool when he calls, and he loves us for that. We do too.

Beware of the guy who’s been there, done that.

A client of mine had a business partner. When I met him, we set off on the right foot. He was pleasing and knew everything about stuff, so he shared what he wanted, and I completely understood him. He was one of the few who actually knew what he was talking about. Then he shared that he had done the same thing a few years ago.

He had sold website services to almost all major players in Dubai, and gone bust. ‘What do you do when you’ve sold a widget to everyone who needs that widget,’ he asked, and I’m paraphrasing. I thought to myself, hmm, that’s a good question. At the time, I didn’t care. I wanted to finish his work and, as another British client once said, get out of his hair!

So I did, and the project went well, as he had wanted. A couple of years went by and they hired us for a rebuild. Times had changed. Instead of writing broken, semi-broiled back-end dynamic systems and calling them content management systems or CMS, the world was moving on to WordPress. This time, we built the site using that, and it let their team add properties to their site easily, rather than the old-fashioned, painful way.

That was it. This didn’t meet his expectations because what he wanted was, well, the old and tired solution. While the site worked and everything looked and felt nice, he rallied that they wouldn’t pay us our second 50% payment and would keep the site. Ah, said I, he had a point. We had trusted them and deployed everything on their domain, for which they safely kept the keys. And yes, it was my bad to have trusted that he’d know technology moves on faster than we can breathe these days. But his pain from losing his earlier business, combined with what he knew, ended up punishing us. The point? Things can go sideways anytime, so cover your bases.

Call for an account-level meeting.

There’s something called an account-level meeting. It’s a meeting you request with a client when the dynamics of the game have changed. Like when someone new has come along and is demanding changes, or when the scope of a project is on the verge of growing exponentially.

So I did. A new mid-level manager had arrived at one of my best clients. While she was reasonable and highly educated, she made a few remarks about the project that insinuated that we might be at fault. Now, these remarks targeted, if you can guess it, the choices made and design instructions given to us by, well, you guessed it, my client! They were fair choices, and I requested an account-level meeting to share how things had worked so far. She was all pleased about it.

Once we spoke, I clarified our role in managing all the projects being developed. There were a couple of websites and a few systems that would run my mind numb, all finance-related. That was her challenge too. After sharing how my client had set things up, we were all good. Things moved smoothly.

If you’re ever going to have someone new join the project, feel them. They could be under pressure from the challenges of being in a new environment.

Feel whither the wind bloweth!

Let’s be clear, the post isn’t titled crackpots, so not every story here is about one. Yet there was this manager who’d left a large real estate developer and joined a much smaller company, who were my client. He went about bringing a new vision, talking about a big change in deploying some system and integrating it with their website. All for the want of having everything work seamlessly.

If you work regularly with business owners like I do, and for years and years, you get to know what they’re all about. You have a whiff of their budgets, their business direction, and their core services. So I explained politely that this wasn’t the best plan for my client and that it was wise to take things, a step at a time.

He did what he wanted. He hired another team to create a new website. His thing was, let’s have more lifestyle photos,… or stock photos, or photos everyone uses all the time. They could have easily updated these on the existing site. After all, that’s why you build using WordPress! Its purpose is to let you make updates swiftly. I digress.

No worries. In such situations, I step aside. I don’t appeal to my clients to retain us. It’s their business, and they’re making the right choice for themselves. If they see more value elsewhere, I don’t mind. However, in most cases, ‘elsewhere’ often means finding another job and moving over within the two years the chap’s got at, well, the place he wants to revolutionize! So two years later, he’s gone, and the guy he brought in, the one who made two thousand websites, is gone too. They all go with the wind, as long as it’s blowing their way.

A never ending story…

This post could easily grow into a tiny book. As I wrote this, I kept recalling all the other incidents where dealing with difficult clients absolutely cost me my patience. But that’s for another day…

The way forward is to have your goals in mind, not your ego, your pride, or your ineptness at hearing someone out. The way forward is to know when someone’s being reasonable and when they’re not. All these new boys and girls coming to the UAE for web design and development jobs, weren’t even born when some of us were creating our first websites. I recall publishing my first one on Tripod and created it using Microsoft FrontPage back in 1997. That’s how far some of us go.

We’ve gone from those early years to mastering our work and understanding web technology. Beyond what people have reduced it to today, a couple of frameworks and shoddy coding habits. Forget design altogether, they don’t even teach it in computer science or related curriculums.

So lads, the next time you want to play ball, try to figure out who’s standing in front of you. Is it you, or is it Michael Jordan?