We recently onboarded a US client for our company. This client was doing development in another company for the last 5 or so years and approached us for further development of that product. That product was developed with no documentation and we asked time for understanding the system and picking up the small user stories along the way. He was nice till starting the project. We are barely into the 3rd month of development and now he is abusing our employees in languages that could not be posted in any platform. These abuses are for the errors already existing in that platform and we are not responsible ; that we can prove anywhere. How can we deal with this situation. Our company is very new and just completed 1 year now. We are in no way dependent on this client for our survival and what will be the best way to escape from such a mess?
Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
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Re: Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
#2Simple.
Remove him/her.
Under no circumstance would I allow anyone at my company to abuse their power, and abuse other people.
As long as you have very clear evidence of his/her gross miss conduct, then I would terminate your contract.
Re: Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
#3Keep records of every communication with this person, all emails, phone records, etc
Have an urgent meeting and discuss your concerns. Make it clear their abuse is not appropriate and will not be tolerated. Tell them you will have no option but to discontinue the project if they continue.
Re: Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
#4Keep records of every communication with this person, all emails, phone records, etc Have an urgent meeting and discuss your concerns. Make it clear their abuse is not appropriate and will not be tolerated. Tell them you will have no option but to discontinue the project if they continue.
We are collecting all the videos and text abusive communications now. Have a ton of them now. We are looking for a way to strongly communicate to the client that we will not be tolerating this. We prepared an email but that that seems trivial compared to what he has done through his text and video communications.
Re: Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
#5Keep records of every communication with this person, all emails, phone records, etc Have an urgent meeting and discuss your concerns. Make it clear their abuse is not appropriate and will not be tolerated. Tell them you will have no option but to discontinue the project if they continue.
We are collecting all the videos and text abusive communications now. Have a ton of them now. We are looking for a way to strongly communicate to the client that we will not be tolerating this. We prepared an email but that that seems trivial compared to what he has done through his text and video communications.
You seem to have been really patient with them, probably to a fault. It would have been best to speak to them after the first instance of this and then drop the client altogether if they had continued.
Re: Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
#6Simple. Remove him/her. Under no circumstance would I allow anyone at my company to abuse their power, and abuse other people. As long as you have very clear evidence of his/her gross miss conduct, then I would terminate your contract.
Yes that removing is simple at first. Whenever we onboard a client we are taking a small risk by allocating and blocking the resources. This might not be a problem for big and medium sized companies but for a budding company like us this has a hidden effect. We would have been devastated if this was our first or second client.
Re: Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are collecting all the videos and text abusive communications now. Have a ton of them now. We are looking for a way to strongly communicate to the client that we will not be tolerating this. We prepared an email but that that seems trivial compared to what he has done through his text and video communications.
You seem to have been really patient with them, probably to a fault. It would have been best to speak to them after the first instance of this and then drop the client altogether if they had continued.
Yes, our project manager was taking all the hits as this was a new project and hoping that the situation will change. Now he has shared us a few sample communications and we could not even hear the first few minutes of videos.
Re: Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
#8Some people like special treatment. Is there anyone on your team wiling to act as a buffer to soak in the bile? Have them be the point of contact and have them say whatever will appease this person’s ego, e.g ‘Yeah, you are 100% right, you know if you want my opinion I think this stuff should be done, I will try to go to bat for you’ and just have this person regularly communicate and provide special treatment to this ego (an account manager). Have all contact go through this person and see if they can wrangle the ego on the other side to find reasonable compromises.
Money is money, this client didn’t take their money away, right? That’s the only thing that matters. De-escalate the situation and have a nanny comfort the idiot parting with his money - play it smarter, silo off communication from the the rest of the team and have it go through the nanny (and pay the nanny a bonus later for managing the situation). If the current point of contact is not working, have them become the bad cop, and throw in a good cop temporarily. Have bad cop always deliver the obvious requirements, have good cop deliver their special requests. In fact, reset the relationship with the good cop and just have him/her straight up appeal to the client ‘we believe this project can be handled better’.
But don’t send away the money if it’s not walking away on it’s own.
Re: Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
#9Some people like special treatment. Is there anyone on your team wiling to act as a buffer to soak in the bile? Have them be the point of contact and have them say whatever will appease this person’s ego, e.g ‘Yeah, you are 100% right, you know if you want my opinion I think this stuff should be done, I will try to go to bat for you’ and just have this person regularly communicate and provide special treatment to thi…
This sounds like a risky approach. There are many ways this could backfire, from burning out the buffer person to creating a culture of prioritizing bad clients. Not saying it's impossible to routinely handle abusive customers and make a consistent profit, just that's a risky proposition that takes special (not necessarily in a positive way) talent to pull off.
Re: Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?
#10Some people like special treatment. Is there anyone on your team wiling to act as a buffer to soak in the bile? Have them be the point of contact and have them say whatever will appease this person’s ego, e.g ‘Yeah, you are 100% right, you know if you want my opinion I think this stuff should be done, I will try to go to bat for you’ and just have this person regularly communicate and provide special treatment to thi…
This sounds like a risky approach. There are many ways this could backfire, from burning out the buffer person to creating a culture of prioritizing bad clients. Not saying it's impossible to routinely handle abusive customers and make a consistent profit, just that's a risky proposition that takes special (not necessarily in a positive way) talent to pull off.
All good points, the only thing I’ll say about the notion of ‘good clients’ is that, usually, you have to work your way up to good clients. This is true even if you are just an ordinary person looking for a job, you will need a framework to handle low paying or minimal growth roles.
When you only have a handful of clients, even the shittiest one matters. Setting standards for what you will or won’t put up with this early may not be optimal. Getting the framework in place internally for your team to identify the problem clients, keeping the toxicity transparent and distributed through proper heatsinks will lead to the more organic evolution of what you will or will not put up with from a client when money is involved.
So part of the framework could actually mean de-prioritizing the client’s work internally, while prioritizing communication and expectations for some time. You could also boost morale of your team by requiring sign off from leadership on every little deliverable to show that you acknowledge the problem and those managing it internally.