Lifestyle Soup

12 February 2008 | Business | ray

One of the hardest lessons I have learned in business is that when you try to be helpful by bending your own rules and giving your customer extra privileges you spoil them, and they they will expect those privileges indefinitely. Here are 4 steps to convert even the best customer into a life sucking monster. They are lessons I have learned the hard way and would not wish on anybody. They are lessons I still feel the repercussions of to this day.

Give them a discount

I have made this mistake way too many times. When you give somebody a discount, it’s like giving them a small slice of your soul. They believe they deserve it. From the customer perspective, you have bent on one of your policies which means you probably have more policies you will bend on, which leads naturally to think that you should …

Give them special free support

If you run a business that gives free support for a product, like web hosting in my case, that is one thing. It is when the customer will then ask for you to give support that is above and beyond the established support you have promised them. In the case of web hosting, they might call up and not only ask you for help logging in, but for you to install a new piece of software on their website, configure it and customize it, all for free because they already pay you good money. In other words, a customer will try to make you into their own free consultant because they think you owe it to them. It’s very tempting to show them how nice a person you are, but that leads us to our third problem, you risk not having firm boundaries.

Don’t set boundaries

Boundaries might just be the most important idea in business. If you don’t set clear cut boundaries, it can actually be a real disservice to the customer because they honestly don’t know where you stand. Maybe one day you go above and beyond the call of duty, but another day they ask for help again and you feel imposed on.

We can apply Parkinson’s law here and realize that if you do not set boundaries, your client will continue to ask for more favors because they think it’s okay, since you don’t seem to mind. Then when you are completely disgusted at the customer and start finding yourself bitter about how the relationship has gone south, you feel like the customer is needy, and they think you are acting horribly unprofessional.

Promise before you’re ready

One of the biggest issues I have had in the past has been promising things prior to them being ready. Promising new features to software, promising a new product, etc. The real problem here is not what I promised, but when I made it. I would make the promise and realize later on that I couldn’t live up to the promise.

I would suggest that you not make promises until you are nearly ready to follow through on that promise. I know what you might be thinking, “but usually when I make promises it’s because I’ve got somebody yelling at me.” In that case, make very conservative promises. When you don’t fulfill promises, it’s just one more thing your customer can hold over your head.

Early on in my business, I had a customer who said he refused to pay until we added a promised feature to his website. The customer went out of business (for other reasons) before we got around to adding the feature and we never saw another penny from him. Seems foolish to give such a deal, right? Well, we were sure we would have the feature added within a month, and the boundaries were already busted wide open. Boy did we learn our lesson there. I think I can still feel the pain down below.

It is extremely important to set expectations with your customers very early on and not to stray from them. If you do stray, you will not only hurt yourself in the long run, but you will hurt your client because they will get mixed signals from you. Special care must be exercised not to go down any of these steps, because it’s nearly impossible to return. Ultimately, you need to be consistent and only make promises you are positive you can keep.

You have a choice here, win-win, or win-lose with you the loser. It’s never the other way.

(Image by upsand)

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