A
customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on
us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the
purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are
not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an
opportunity to do so.
Mahatma Gandhi
I don’t
believe the customer is always right. I believe as humans, we are all capable
of being wrong at any time about anything. In an environment as ambiguous as
the misnomer many refer to as SEO, the potential for mistakes is virtually
boundless.
BUT, I do
believe you can win the battle and lose the war. You can convince a customer
that you are right and he is wrong but trust me, you very likely just lost that
customer.
The smart
thing to do is LISTEN to what they are demanding until you understand their
concerns and then deliver!
When dealing
with demanding clients it is easy to become frustrated and it is only human
nature to blame the client as the cause of your frustration. The truth is that
YOU are the reason the customer is being demanding in the first place.
If any reasonable
client is demanding, it is only because they are expecting something they thought
you could deliver. Why did they think you could deliver it? Because YOU gave
them that impression in the first place.
I’m ashamed
to admit that I failed to take my own advice. You don’t become a guru by always
being right. You are able to teach only by sharing the mistakes and failures as
well as the successes.
I was
fortunate to have a client late last year that was demanding and completely
honest and professional. We tried hard to satisfy his demands but the truth is
I lacked the quality resources I he was expecting and that was my fault.
Until I had
the chance to work with him, I thought I did have the quality. I had spent a
great deal of time and effort trying to better than my direct competitors and I
did that. My mistake was in thinking that was good enough.
I forgot I
wasn’t selling my services to my competitors, I was selling them to a person who
made their expectations very clear, was 100% open and frank about their
expectations and I was the one who didn’t hear him.
I spent over
two months trying hard to understand what he was telling us in plain English but
to my great disappointment, I didn’t “get it” until it was too late and this
client, who could have been a huge boost for my business, had lost faith and
given up on trying to help me and he canceled.
Only after
he canceled did I really put forth the effort to understand. He and I had an
arrangement that could have been EXTREMELY beneficial to us both and I knew
that if he canceled, he wasn’t being demanding, he was trying incredibly hard
to get me to understand and perform at the level he believed I was capable of
from the beginning.
The ONLY
issue he ever had was over the quality of my Indian content developers when they
were producing articles, blog posts etc. I would look and each time convince
myself the content was far better than my Indian counterparts and think that
was good enough. I was wrong.
I am very disappointed
in myself that I failed this person. He deserved better. But I am grateful that
it made me finally understand.
I’ve since spent
a sizeable sum of money and resources to set up a completely different set of
procedures and it taught me a lesson I’ve been preaching to you about all
along.
I hired as
good of talent as I could find in Ahmedabad, THEN I set up an editorial
department back in the states. Now everything that gets written by our content
developers in India gets sent to an American editor who reads the entire
document and corrects any grammatical as well conceptual errors against
American English standards.
This takes a
great deal of more time and money but the quality is now excellent. Every time.
And do you
know what I found? All the extra time and expense is not an expense at all
because I learned AGAIN, that one quality article/post/blog is worth 100 automated
ones. One piece of excellent quality content is worth more than 50 posts that are better
than my competitors.
Had I not
been brought to task by this demanding client, I have no idea how long I would
have kept disappointing clients who were less vocal about their expectations.
But thanks to him, we are already seeing increased satisfaction from our clients,
increased traffic from improved placements and increased conversions from
better content!
I know it
sounds trite but I’m telling you the truth from experience,(and of course
experience is what you get when you’re expecting something else); -------
THERE IS NO
SUCH THING AS A BAD CUSTOMER !
When you
find yourself getting frustrated and defensive with a demanding client, stop
and think for just a moment and try to avoid the mistake I made. Those
demanding clients are the best and they are trying very hard to help you! Those
are the ones you NEED to satisfy and the all the rest come easy.
Peach Y’all
Da guru
Stop
Jumpin on the damn bed or I’ll come in there with my belt and give you sumpin
to jump about!