Have you broken up with your toxic customer yet?

“Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted make-up.” ― Marian Keyes

Demanding. Unreasonable. Indifferent. Difficult. Awkward. Dissatisfied. Those are great ways to describe your toughest to please customers. They teach us our best lessons about commitment, patience and persistence and help us become better at serving them!

Yes, we have also drunk through that fire hose of why the customer is always right and why the customer is always king!

In such a hyper-competitive world where customer-centricity is one mantra to live by, is it blasphemous to then ask about breaking up with your customer?

No, it is not! So why not?

Let me qualify. There are still some customers who are:

• Exploiting your trust and commitment
• Abusing your goodwill by ranting
• Manipulating situations to make it "I win, you lose" always
• Draining your employee morale

It takes a leader some heart and even more courage to break up because it could damage revenues for the next few quarters, years even. The situation gets even scarier if you are a small business just starting up and desperate for customers!

Business owners and leaders still spend a lot of their energy and tact to nurture such difficult relationships. Which begs a question:

Should they really be sustaining such “bad revenue” instead of concentrating on growing “good revenue"?

Let me attempt to explain.

Retain to Attain – Preserve Values to Preserve Customers

“Values aren't buses... They're not supposed to get you anywhere. They're supposed to define who you are.” ― Jennifer Crusie

A friend of mine who works for a well known global technology company and sells large transformation deals. These regularly run into hundreds of millions over many years. He recently told me his struggle in dealing with a high value customer. With astronomical budget spends, the customer was tough to ignore. However, the client would routinely share bid responses from my friend's company with an incumbent when they bid for new projects. It was obvious they were not in a trusted “customer relationship”. It was a clear misuse of privilege to drive undue advantage of their suppliers repeatedly.

Key Takeaways:

●      Decide what your customer "culture fit” is in terms of your rules of engagement

●      Lose before you win if you have to, but do not compromise on your core values

●      Focus and deliver on the strength of those values. They always outlive your quarter

Back to the Future – Relive before you Believe

“Don't waste your love on somebody who doesn't value it.” - Shakespeare

I vividly remember a customer who kept asking us for more discounts with every passing engagement. There was always a different excuse – sometimes it was poor service quality, at other times it an unsatisfactory deliverable and sometimes it was just cheeky one-off goodwill gestures to pay end of quarter invoices on time. Keen to make our mark having only recently opened that key relationship, we continued to succumb to all of his demands.

Over time, when we did a historical analysis of our costs to serve and realized that we were bleeding in more ways than one on that relationship. By constantly moving the goalpost, he was fooling us for his own benefit rather than working with us in a true partnership. Further, the amount of time we spent servicing his needs was keeping us away from our other valued customers. Tough as it was, it made no sense to continue.

Key Takeaways:

• Don’t rush to deliver just in order to please.
• Look back before you look ahead to a partnership
• Grow with your customers, not in spite of them

The Employee Perspective – Engage before they Disengage

“Morale still seems reasonably high and, while the desertion rate has risen, it is still limited to those who can walk.” – Woody Allen

Servicing a large public sector client, another friend of mine saw his hair go from black to white and then settle down as a toupee. This was no ordinary customer for his firm after all. Keen to get her own way for political reasons, the client was more eager to extract service penalties rather than ensure the safe delivery of the programme and repeatedly created roadblocks.

Being in the sensitive position of being the prime contractor responsible for managing all other vendors, my friend's company stretched all boundaries. He however faced the brunt of it and even though the project was ultimately delivered with some delays and penalties, he had enough and left.

Key Takeaways:

• Respect your people who perform with purpose to build long lasting relationships
• Don’t be vulnerable. Stand up for employees when dealing with unfair customers or get used to losing good employees due to bad customers
• Don’t fear customer conflict. Use tact but don't delude yourself when all is not well

Keeping it Real - Break Up if its Broken

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” - Dr. Seuss

Cheating. Dodgy. Unfair. Misleading. Manipulative. Lying. Surely, that’s no way to describe anyone, least of all your valued customer! It's not easy but why do we then continue to indulge when we know some customer relationships are beyond repair?

I am sure you have had your own interesting customer experiences in managing such relationships and learnt from them.

• How did you deal with such clients?
• Did you abandon them or carried on regardless? Why?

Please share, like and comment about your own experiences if you liked what you read!

Some of my other articles have been featured on LinkedIn under Customer Experience, Leadership & Management, Career Development, Big Ideas & Innovation, What Inspires Me. Here are some quick links:

• Building great Customer Experiences: Be invested, Be Inspired, Be Personal
• Tips on leading a better Professional and Personal Life
• What's Cooking: Life Inspirations from Cooking
• From Grit to Great: Lessons from the Sales front line
• Learning from nature: Adapting for personal growth
• Striking the Right Note: Inspirations from a children's music concert

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Abhishek is an Associate Vice President, EMEA at Persistent Systems in London. Persistent is a market leading software product engineering services company and digital transformation partner to some of the world's largest technology brands and innovative enterprises. He has previously led regional sales and business development teams at Wipro, Cognizant and Cisco and holds an MBA from INSEAD. He has lived, studied and worked in India, U.S., Singapore, France and U.K. He considers himself a passionate globalist and in his spare time, a free-range foodie and an aspiring author. All opinions are his own