Fire Your Customer!
Fire Your Customer!
Sometimes you should.
Recently, I was working with one of my coaching clients who runs his own website development business. He was facing a dilemma. He had a customer who was giving him a lot of grief. He had built the customer’s website as he was contracted to do but the customer wanted more. He always blamed the website developer for anything that went wrong. He was constantly asking for additional services that were not in their agreement. And he would continuously call the developer to get status updates — preventing the website developer from actually being able to work on the website.
In addition, the customer was a bit paranoid about the information on his website and so he locked out the website developer from being able to work on the entire site. It wasn’t a comfortable situation for either party.
After listening to his frustration, I explained to my coaching client that sometimes you need to fire your customer. The best way to do this is to apologize to the customer. You might want to say something like, “I personally apologize that I was not able to successfully provide you with the level of service you deserve. In fairness to you, I encourage you to find someone with whom you will have a greater level of satisfaction and who will deliver the work exactly the way you want it. Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to serve you and I wish you nothing but success in the future.”
I also recommend that if you are going to refer a customer to someone else, make sure that you provide him with more than one option. If you only suggest one vendor, he is surely to complain about that one as well and, naturally, it will be your fault for being the person who referred him to that vendor. If you give your client several options, it’s up to him to make the selection.
Just remember that when you say, “Good-bye,” to the wrong customers, it will allow you more time to say, “Hello,” to the right ones.
“You must fire bad customers just as you would fire a bad employee. If you do not get rid of your bad employees, the good employees will leave. If I do not fire bad customers, not only will my good customers leave but many of my good employees will leave as well.” – Robert Kiyosaki
(This excerpt is taken from my seminar entitled The Fine Art of Saying, “No!”) I encourage you to click here to register for my exclusive live Zoom The Fine Art of Saying, “No!” seminar on Thursday, October 13, 2022 from 9 AM to 12 noon Eastern Standard Time.
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