Lessons from Tough Customer Interactions

Early on in my career, I had the opportunity to learn some good lessons from a tough client interaction. Those lessons stuck with me, and now I'd like to share them with you.

So let's set the scene. I had recently been hired into my first corporate role 3 months prior to this incident. I was working for a company that provided, among other things, a software solution to business to fulfill their tax information reporting. They also offered as an add on, managed service and print service offerings to have a dedicated rep to assist in utilizing the application on behalf of the customer and to fulfill the obligation to furnish the printed statements to recipients through their print vendor.

That's were I came in; I was one of the managed services representatives, and my client was a medium size employer, who along with hundreds of other customers that year, was utilizing a module within a legacy product to fulfill their ACA reporting of 1095 forms. They had no prior relationship with the company or familiarity with our software, and no prior experience with ACA reporting. So the situation was exacerbated by all of our inexperience.

So now the incident. During January, all of the reporting kicked off, this client had chosen to use our print service offering, and so in December had been assigned a print date which served as the finish-line of the various tasks. The print date was chosen with respect to the type of forms, and the capacity planning of our print vendors. And partially because of that capacity planning, and also because the managed service team relied on clients finishing timely so they could complete other critical tasks timely, there was a late fee associated with not approving print files timely. And unfortunately, my client had just missed their print date incurring a late fee and losing their guarantee of timely printing.

So here's my first lesson. Clients are busy. Clients do not have perfect memory. And inexperience with product functions, or even the reporting process only makes the ability of clients to reliably follow through on their portions of a project all the more difficult. I, incorrectly, made the assumption that the print services agreement they had signed with print dates and consequence of missing that date, the meeting in December outlining the January tasks, and the schedule of services document provided to them listing the entire years tasks would have been enough of a reminder.

It was not, and this customer did not login to review and approve their print file by the deadline. All it would have taken to mitigate this, would have been an email and/or phone call 24 hours prior to the deadline to remind and educate the client on their impending actions.

Now I was not without sympathy. Part of the reason this client missed their deadline, was that they were not in the office on their print date due to a massive winter storm ... in a city that doesn't really ever get snow. So when I failed to reach her on the print date, and reached out to my supervisor and director for advice on what how to proceed, I was struggling with having to deliver my first piece of bad news to a customer ever. I drafted and edited the email for hours, hoping there were some magic words that wouldn't upset my customer, that would be professional and clear, and make the whole thing blow over. But when you have to tell somebody they're going to be charged a late fee, they're rarely going to be okay with that.

That was lesson number two: There are no magic words. It isn't worth the time and effort and angst to agonize over delivering bad news. It is enough to be factual and professional. No logical argument, or perfect turn of phrase will alleviate the emotional reaction to finding out you've been charged a fee you weren't expecting, especially if you think that it reflects poorly on you to your boss or colleagues or is unfairly applied like my client thought. It is more important to present the facts, let them react, stay calm and professional in response and work through the problem from there.

And boy did this client react. They were obviously embarrassed that they had missed a deadline, frustrated that it seemed we weren't taking into account the mitigating circumstances of the snow storm, and annoyed that a project that had been going relatively smoothly up until then had taken a sudden turn for the worse. When I did finally get in touch with them, they were motivated to mark the files ready as soon as possible, but away from their desk they didn't have access to the application, and was further annoyed when I had to tell them I couldn't review and mark the files ready on their behalf. So instead we got to sit on an awkward screen share, where they controlled my machine and logged into the application with their credentials.

It was really just a perfect storm of a bad experience. In the end, after push back from my client and their leaders, we decided to waive the late fee. My supervisor and I sat down with my client and their boss and hashed out a go forward plan.

And for the next year, I made sure that any deadline or new piece of information was accurately and clearly communicated to this client ahead of when they needed it. But the relationship never really recovered. And finally things culminated with an email stating their intent not to utilize our services and solution for the coming year's reporting. To which I replied that they had a three year agreement with us. To which they responded by having their lawyer call me.

And here's the final lesson: sometimes it's you. After running the cancellation up the chain, I sat in my directors office explaining why this client was cancelling. And she asked point blank if there's anything we could have done to save the account and my reply was something to the effect of, "I think another rep may have been able to save the account, I just think the client doesn't like me". And lo and behold, in conversations I wasn't privy to, that's exactly what we convinced the customer of. And for that next year, with a new rep, and movement to a newer product, that client went through season successfully and to my knowledge renewed their contract 2 years later.

My client and I had both held a grudge and took the incident personally. It had damaged the relationship, our objectivity, and ultimately the business. It is important to be able to work through the emotions and to look at the situation objectively. I should have been more in tune with this client's sentiment and reached out sooner about their diminished health. If I had, we may have never had to get the lawyers involved, and we may have been more proactive in addressing this client's needs.