Dealing With Clients Who Didn’t Listen to You

It’s happened to me a few times, I’m sure it’s happened to you. You offer technical advice to a client, perhaps a recommendation to upgrade their machine, to install anti-virus, to avoid nefarious websites, or to discard and not open suspicious emails. Whatever the situation, they didn’t listen, or they do the exact opposite of what you had recommended. In spite of the fact you had explicitly warned them, they blame you, your team, or anything else that has no relation to the issue. How do you deal with such clients?

If the issue is regarding malware removal, or some other procedure for which you can present actual log files and documentation for, provide it upon job completion, so you have something written up to stand on to back you up if they come back in complaining you didn’t fix it, when you actually did.

Use Tact

The first thing you’ll want to say is of course, ‘I told you so!’ But they already know that. They’re possibly angry or frustrated as well, and if you fire back an angry reply, you’re just throwing more wood on the fire. Be tactful, respectful, and calm, acknowledge their feelings, and try to understand what caused the issue. Occasionally the case is that they let someone else use their machine and that individual caused the problem, such as a child or maybe a grandchild, downloading games or other software. Perhaps it wasn’t that they didn’t listen, but their grandchild didn’t listen, and that’s why the machine has issues again.

It’s best to be civil for the sake of the client relationship, if it can be salvaged. Another reason you don’t want to blow your top at a client is that your client may then post reviews of your services in a bad light along with a story of how unprofessional you were by also attacking them verbally or losing your temper. Bad reviews are one thing, and we all have to deal with them, even when they’re false, but don’t make it worse by replying in anger.

Illustrate

Once they’ve calmed down, try to explain what happened, what you warned against, and what recommendation wasn’t followed, or whatever the case may be. If their level of expertise on the subject isn’t high enough to understand the technical terminology, try another way. What do they do for a living, or do they have an industry their expertise is in? If you have any knowledge of that industry, try to illustrate a similar situation, i.e. performance bottlenecks can be compared to a large pipeline with small diameter joints.

If the client still blames you or your advice, illustrate your profession. For instance, if they develop strange symptoms and can’t figure out what’s wrong, they go to the doctor, right? And the doctor says ‘You have (insert condition here)’ and gives you medical advice and perhaps even a prescription. Now, if you don’t take his advice and perhaps don’t take the medication as advised, and the problem worsens or comes back, whose fault is it? What will the doctor say when you go back? ‘Why didn’t you do what I told you to do? If you had followed my advice you would be better by now…’

Someone who isn’t a mechanic may take their vehicle to a repair shop and ask why it’s making strange noises, and hearing the diagnosis, they can either ignore it and suffer the consequences, perhaps a ruined engine, or they can apply the advice from the diagnosis and hopefully all goes well. But would it be fair to blame the mechanic if you don’t follow his advice and then continue to have problems?

The same applies to our technical expertise, except we’re working on electronics instead of biological tissue. It might help to discern what their area of expertise is, their career, and use some similar illustration, such as going to an accountant for advice, or a lawyer, or a professional consultant.

Determine Client Value

If they still argue with you after you attempt to illustrate it to them, this is the point where you decide if it’s worth it to keep them as a client. If you can’t reason with them in a logical manner with logical arguments, and they still want to cause trouble, it’s not really worth it. They can take their business elsewhere. Gracefully decline to perform work for them anymore and leave it at that.

If you can manage to salvage the client relationship and it’s worth salvaging, since they pay on time for work you do, and this is the first or perhaps only the second time something like this has happened, chalk it up to a bad day on their part and move on. You never know what may be going on in their personal life, and you might have been the first person they’ve had actual contact with that day, and so you get to be the punching bag, so show a little sympathy, we all get bad days.

If you have any tips on dealing with clients who didn’t listen, drop a comment below!