Nightmare Customers.
Yup, we all have seen them. Customers that are plain dumb, incompetent, hard to please and who knows what else. Ever deal with one? If not then your time will come. Of course I’m not immune I’ve been one of those dumb customers for some vendors that’s for sure! Blame it on ignorance, bad hair day or what ever. Really no excuse for it.
Case Study: Local Government IT Department vs Vendor
Here’s a classic example (based on true story): Customer has their own IT department and gave the vendor certain information for configuring some networking devices. So the vendor programs the devices with the info provided to them from the client. All is well. Or at least it seems because when the vendor communicates with the client asking if everything is ok they never hear back. So assuming that no news is good news they close out the job and move on. Well, fast forward a couple of months and customer calls vendor saying they can’t communicate with the device and are wondering what was the IP address programmed on the networking equipment. Uh, hello? You guys gave that info to the vendor in the first place. Don’t you ever communicate with your co-workers? Where is your documentation? Eeesh. Talk about frustrating. Sometimes you just want to reach through the phone and slap someone.
How do you prevent stuff like this from happening?
Well, document your processes, carbon copy multiple people so that someone else at the customer’s office knows what’s going on. Make them sign a service contract so that if they call a few months down the road they have to pay up before you start helping (unless something is under warranty then you might be forced to cover it). After all, your time is valuable and being tied up on the phone all day with incompetent non-paying customers is not the best use of that time. Learn from your mistakes and hopefully it won’t happen again. The worse thing is falling for the same mistake twice.
