We’ve all had “problem clients”… the guy that thinks scope creep is natural and acceptable, the gal that approves everything at every step of the project, until it’s time to pay the final invoice, then suddenly discovers that the color that she specified and approved just “isn’t right”. Sometimes they just lie to us… they profess complete innocence regarding the 20,000 garbage links that magically appeared or they didn’t mention, because they “didn’t think it was important”, that they had three previous manual actions against their site.
Once in a while, we may even find ourselves dealing with a client that tries to bully us, demanding far more than what the scope of our service includes. They threaten and cajole, then apologize and promise it’ll never happen again… and promptly repeat the behavior.
When we encounter this sort of client, our blood pressure rises, our motivation falters and we sometimes find ourselves daydreaming about firing them. This isn’t what we signed on for – we shouldn’t have to put up with this – there are plenty of other clients to be had… we tell ourselves all sorts of things to vent our anger or frustration. And sometimes, we vent to the client.
That’s not always a bad thing. Some things need to be said. But how we say them can make a world of difference in how effective it is.