My Two Cents: Even if you think a client is pissed, COMMUNICATE!

At the end of November, I hired my lil-bro to burn all my CD’s to a hard drive. He’s really good at this kind of stuff and needed the bucks so it seemed like a good idea. Burning all my CD’s to a hard drive has two benefits: 1) I can make a few bucks selling them after the fact and 2) I won’t have to look at them collecting dust in my living room.

It is now March and lil-bro has been incommunicado for over 2 months. I’ve emailed him twice and all I got back was the sound of crickets.⁽¹⁾ Considering he has over 5k worth of my music collection, I felt it necessary to bring in the big guns – aka his Mom.

Fortunately for me, lil-bro lives with his mother who is easily the most responsible person on the planet. Normally I would eschew parental involvement but like I said, he’s been incommunicado and has over 5k worth of my music.

Yay Mom. She put a fire under his butt and as of today assures me lil-bro is burning CD’s like crazy. ⁽³⁾ The whole kit-and-caboodle should be in the mail within a few days.  But, I still haven’t heard from lil-bro and I’m kind of bummed.  If only to tell him I’m not mad; I just wanted a status update.

TAKE AWAY: Even if you think a client is pissed, COMMUNICATE!

How hard is it to send an email that essentially says “I’m working on it”?  Chances are your customer isn’t as mad as you imagine. And for sure they’re less pissed off today than they will be next week.

Granted “my dog ate my homework” only works once and if you’re a terminal excuse maker you will fail at being a business owner but if I’ve learned anything from working with clients virtually, email updates go a LONG way to making customers happy; especially when projects take longer than you think. A little information goes a long way to preventing clients from filling in the blanks with the worst case scenario.

So. When you screw up and blow a deadline, admit it. Admit it as soon as possible, as accurately as possible and tell them how you will make it right. In the long run you could quite possibly wind up with a happy client.

Foot Notes:

(1) I didn’t call him because I don’t have his cell # and no one ever answers the house line. Why they keep it? I don’t know.

(2) I’m no newbie to project management. I offered him a bonus to complete the job by the end of January.

(3) Sorry Dude. Really didn’t want to bring your Mom into it but hey, you’ve got all my tunes!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.