Communication Deal Breakers

We’ve had very few dissatisfied clients. That isn’t bragging, just a fact. We’ve had three that have come to a point of non-workability. In every case, the same issue was at the heart of the dissatisfaction. I felt them going south long before the client complained.

The issue was poor communication. Many of our clients are not really good at emailing, but they’ll at least give us enough info to go forward with, and the job gets done. These three could not communicate at all.

• If we asked for information, they would not give it until we had asked multiple times, if at all.
• If we asked for an opinion on a design, they’d say, “oh, that isn’t right.” And they’d offer nothing more helpful than that, leaving us stabbing in the dark for a new direction in spite of pointed questions which were never answered.
• When instructions or explanations of processes were given to them, they were simply ignored. Explanations would be given in simple terms one day, and complaints lodged the following day about the same thing that was explained the day before.
• They typically wanted things in a hurry, but did not want to communicate the needed information until the deadline had passed, and then they’d wonder why we didn’t have it done within hours of when they turned in days worth of work. Explanations of how much time things took were misinterpreted or ignored.

I’ve learned to recognize some of them ahead of time, but sometimes I fail to spot them until we are a few tasks in. By that time we have enough invested that we have to try to at least make it work until the initial contract is done. Somewhere along in there you can see it coming though, the meltdown from which there is no recovery.

I’ve also learned that when things reach a certain point, a quick refund is the best solution. Fault ceases to mean anything, and it is worth letting it go just to move on and not have to worry about which thing will go wrong next because of inadequate info or lack of clarity in instructions.

There are other types of problem clients – some waste your time, some do not know what they want, others expect far more than they have paid for. But I’d take any one of them and make it work before I’ll knowingly choose to work with a client who refuses to communicate required information and then blames for not getting what they want.

It always leaves me feeling down. I always look for something I could have done better, something I should have done to prevent it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes as a webmaster, and apologized to a lot of clients. These three are the ones that I gave more than could have ever been reasonably expected, and still could not rescuse from disaster. I think it is because I gave so much that I felt so discouraged when it did not help. And while I am on the alert for this kind of client, and prefer to avoid them now, I would do the same again if I discover that I’m in the middle of another – I’d still give everything I felt I could to try to salvage it, even knowing it probably would not work.

Because the one thing worse than having a client leave through no fault of your own, is having a client leave while you wonder whether there was something more you could have done. I get past it a lot faster when I know that I did my absolute best.