Getting a bad customer can not only cause you a lot of stress and cost you a lot of money, it can have an adverse affect on your whole business and culture. You need to disqualify as many of these bad apples as you can before you start any work with them. In today’s market with a massive shortage of skilled tradespeople and good service providers you should be able to choose your clients. So choose them wisely.
Why you want to do this
In our service business we have had thousands of customers over the years. Some have been an absolute pleasure to work with, the vast majority have been fine, some have been difficult and a small percentage have been toxic.
The toxic ones have had a massive effect on staff moral, the reputation of our busoness and in some cases cost many thousands of pounds to manage.
Even in the best case scenario with these guys it is a complete time-drainer dealing with phone calls and replying to emails. You need to get a heads up on these kinds of people right away, identify them and make sure you don’t work with them.
How to identify a potential toxic customer
How to identify a potential toxic customer
Maybe it’s rose-tinted spectacles but service and retail used to be easier. It was never easy but it seems dealing with clients today is harder than it has ever been. With social media, identity politics, Covid 19, lock-downs, supply-chain issues and inflation people are more stressed than they have ever been and maybe some of them certainly feel more entitled.
A small percentage of people are actively looking to be offended, to be offended on someone else’s behalf, genuinely at the end of their rope with a building project or something else, coping with isolation and other stresses and some are genuinely suffering from mental issues. This is very sad but as a small business you need to make sure you don’t work with these people.
Here’s some ideas on how to spot them
1) Tone of the first call. If you get an entitled and rude person calling you up and demanding services that is your first red-flag. Just move along. You don’t need to work with bad people.
2) People asking for help. Hard to do but anyone asking a stranger for help – perhaps because they are having problems with their current contractor or in the middle of a building project – are at the edge. People on the edge can be very unreasonable when they don’t get what they want. In normal life they are often very nice people but they are falling down a well. Don’t get dragged into their decaying orbit.
3) Anyone who has already had a contractor walk out on them. It is always six of one and half a dozen of the other. Maybe the client is to blame, maybe the contractor but it’s not your job to find out. Either way you already have a super-stressed person to deal with and you don’t need the aggravation. Move along, nothing to see here.
4) Anyone calling on behalf of a relative, a friend or their boss. If the end client cannot be bothered to engage with you directly then you are not dealing with the decision maker and quite possibly a rather spoiled individual. Not always the case and you are not likley to get the job anyway but if you do, you will most likely find that you are issued with a set of unreasonable demands by proxy with no recourse. It’s always easier for someone to be unreasonable when they don’t have to communikacte with them directly. Drop these quickly and again move along.
It’s not an exhaustive list. Sometimes your spidey-sense will tingle and your subconcious will be letting you know something is amiss. Listen to your spidey-sense.
How to get rid of them without being rude
Don’t be rude back to them because they will most likely leave a bad review about your business. Bad people weaponize the online review process. If they don’t get what they want they threaten a bad review to leverage a favourable outcome for themselves. The really spiteful ones leave anonymous reviews designed to exact revenge and damage your business. So just tell them you are sorry you can’t help them, you are busy, booked out for the forseeable future and suggest some of your competitors for them to go and speak with.
If you have been suckered in and already taken a deposit then make the hard call early. In my experience when your gut-feeling says ‘get-out’ and you don’t listen to it you invariably regret it and get sucked down the rabbit hole. Apologise, refund their deposit and cancel project.
If you have already started the project – well that is some advice I will share in another article.
Conclusion
When Uber allowed the drivers to publicly rate the client as well as the client rating the driver, an enormous amount of bad behaviour from client’s was eradicated and the expereince for all parties was much better. Until somwone invents a mechanism for this in services and retail make sure you qualify out the rotten apples before they spoil the barrel.
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