When customers are bad apples

Nation's Business, Feb, 1998 by Jenny C. McCune

Into every business owner's lap a few difficult customers must fall. Once you've been on the receiving end of their ire, you know why they're called customers from hell."

Just ask Kevin Wyman, owner of Offroad Outlet Inc. in Redmond, Wash. He knows all about tough customers from selling and installing accessories for trucks and sportutility vehicles.

One recent scrape involved a Jeep owner who needed a hard top for her vehicle. She balked at the price of a new one, but Wyman happened to have a used one. He offered to paint the used top to match the Jeep and sell it for $1,000, half the price of a new, unpainted top. The customer accepted.

A couple of weeks later the woman called to complain about vibration and noises. After inspecting the Jeep, Wyman told the woman that the top needed weatherstripping at a cost of about $60. The woman and her boyfriend demanded that Wyman install the weatherstripping for free. To press their demands, they began complaining vehemently

"I was mystified," Wyman says. "The boyfriend kept on saying they wouldn't pay $600, and I kept on telling him, 'No, we're talking $60, not $600.'"

Ultimately, Wyman agreed to remove the hard top and give the woman a refund. "We haven"t heard anything from them," Wyman said a couple of weeks later, "so hopefully it's finished."

Customer-service experts say that 5 to 10 percent of customers turn out to be difficult. Moreover, such customers appear to be growing in number and seem to be more ornery than ever, says Karen Leland, co-author of Customer Service for Dummies (IDG Books Worldwide, $19.99).

"Consumers are getting a lot less patient,' Leland says. "They're more apt to get fed up and annoyed than in the past." Fortunately, 90 percent of nightmare customers are "made," Leland says. That is, they're irate for a reason -- an order is late, a product breaks, there's a mix-up in shipping-but it's something that a small-business owner can either fix or try to prevent in the future.

Elementary Education

One of the worst customers a small business can encounter is someone who doesn't know anything about the company's product or service and stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that ignorance. Marilyn Jones, president of Consolidated Printing Company Inc., a 20-employee commercial printer in Chicago, has faced this problem.

Jones' firm was about to "dismiss" a customer four years ago because the customer was so difficult to work with. "It was a bigmoney account, but [the customer was short-tempered and nasty,'jones recalls.

The customer clashed so often with the Consolidated Printing representative that Jones took over. She began by analyzing the customer's behavior. "I realized that she wasn't secure in her job. She didn't know how to spec a contract and wasn't willing to admit it," Jones says.

To turn the customer around, Jones figured out how to educate her without making her feel stupid. "I didn't talk down to her, but I would translate printing terms so she could understand what she was doing," Jones says. "I'd say 'shiny paper' instead of 'glossy.'"

With careful nurturing in the form of patient education about the printing process, the difficult customer turned into a Consolidated Printing regular.

Dealing With Indecision

They Harrison, a manager at a 12-employee multimedia graphic-design shop in Boise, Idaho, says the toughest customer to please doesn't know what he wants but doesn't mind wasting your time and money as you try to figure it out. You may not realize you have this kind of customer until he has rejected rounds of your hard work.

One such client, a computer-hardware manufacturer, visited Harrison's company, Oliver, Russell & Associates, last spring. The client needed help building a site on the World Wide Web.

The company's owner told Harrison that he wanted his products to be illustrated using animation rather than photographic images. Harrison's firm produced several prototype Web pages.

The client was delighted -- at first. "He called a couple days later to say it wouldn't work,'harrison says. "He had asked us for a rock. We had given it to him, but it turned out that our definition was different [from] what his office people were telling him.'

So the multimedia company kept bringing out new rocks. The customer would approve them but have second thoughts after showing them to his employees. After several months, the project was put on hold, but not before Harrison's firm had spent at least $2,000 on it.

In hindsight, Harrison says, he should have worked harder to pin down the customer on his needs and should have met with the naysaying employees so he could have dealt with their criticisms directly.

Defusing Anger

Nightmare customers can get very angry. Whatever the source of the anger -- the customer's ignorance, your mistake, or something else -- the situation can be defused. Here are suggestions on what to do:

* First, offer an apology -- even if you believe the client is wrong. "It's not about who's right and who's wrong, it's about how your business makes money in the short and long term," says Kristin Anderson, co-author of Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service (AMACOM, $16.95).