How to Deal with Clients that Watch Everything You Do

I am sure we have all dealt with this at one time or another. You’re on-site at a customer location and the customer will not leave you alone. He/she stands there looking over your shoulder to see what you are doing and in some cases likes to chat with you while you are doing your work. You don’t want to be rude, but it can be very distracting to the technician. I have had this happen to me with one of my SOHO clients. Here is how I dealt with the client watching everything I do and some suggestions for future reference.

The customer is a home office business client of mine who had business sensitive data on her computer and required all work to be done on-site. No problem with that. She gave me the list of tasks to complete and showed me some things on the pc that she needed to migrate to another pc. Again, no problem, business as usual. However, I did notice that the pc was running extremely slow. Even though the end task was to reformat this pc, I still needed to grab a good amount of data to migrate to a backup drive.

Either way I knew these particular job tasks were going to take a few hours to complete. (side note: this was the same job that I referred to in this article when I used Puppy Linux to speed up the data backup.

That helped to shave some time off the project!) This was a new client to me at the time and I’m not sure if there were trust concerns or she thought I was milking the project, but it seemed like she was constantly around to watch what I was doing, and kept asking a number of questions. Questions ranged from “if this pc is worth upgrading” to “what are you doing now.”

The first question was viable, although I thought I was already past explaining the situation and why it was worth upgrading, but it’s still a valid question and I reassured the client. The second question, well…this is where it gets tricky. I think there is no problem explaining where you are in a process and the customer has a right to know.

The problem “situation” occurs when it gets a bit more technical and detailed, or when they start asking about a tool being used. Once I saw that this machine took what seemed like 15 minutes to boot and was horrendously slow navigating I knew that it was time to take out the Live-cd, boot to Linux, and backup the data to the external through Linux.

I can understand the customer wondering why I was inserting a cd and a picture of a puppy shows up on the screen with a bunch of data scrolling, so I happily tried to explain that I was using a tool that allowed me to boot into an alternative operating system that “bypasses” Windows so I can access the data faster and back it up without problems. It’s a valid concern because I know she had sensitive data and for all she knows I could have been somehow manipulating that data.

I tried a quick explanation to try to ease any worries, and techs that have been in similar situations know that it’s difficult to explain something like this to a regular end-user. If you say “I’m using a Linux Live-Cd to boot and run Linux from the RAM,” you already lost them at “Linux!” However, it didn’t seem to satisfy the concern.

Actually, I’m not sure if it was concern, distrust, or perhaps a positive curiosity, but to me it seemed like concern, especially since she proceeded to watch everything I was doing at this point, and asked about every configuration setting I entered when I booted. Then came the “odd” looking desktop screen where more questions persisted, all the while I’m just trying to properly mount everything and transfer the data.

I was trying my best to multi-task by answering the questions as simply as possible. “No, nothing I am doing alters any data on your computer. It’s just another way to transfer your data. Notice how much faster this is?” She did notice it was it faster but still had a confused look as to what I was doing.

That’s normal, but I guess at this point I am feeling a little concerned myself because the customer has watched almost everything I’ve been doing, questioned my tools, and seems to be questioning the entire process. Was this going to proceed for the duration of the project, which still had a good 2-3 hours to go?

Let’s see how I’ve been handling this so far:

• 1. I’ve remained calm and confident.
• 2. I tried my best to calm any concerns the customer may have. I conveyed that I understood the project task and proceeded to go about the work, asking the customer any questions if I needed clarification.
• 3. Even though most technicians (like myself) like to have a minimal amount of distractions while working, you still must remain professional and courteous to the customer. Even though the customer has asked me questions about my process and tools which she may not totally understand, I still answered the questions in a general/non-technical way that tried to educate and show that the problem was being addressed.
• 4. When the questions were too much or I was trying to concentrate on something I would simply say “hang on one second, I just want to make sure this is done correctly” or would put the question off and ask a question like “is this correct data that you need backed up?” I kind of see this as a) stopping the “interrogation process” b) taking control of the situation by being the person asking the questions, and c) showing that I am “doing the job” by reiterating the task at hand and pointing out that it’s getting done. Then once the task I was working on was finished I may politely answer the question they had asked.

Basically I just remained calm, focused on what I was doing, and if the customer broke my focus I would try to politely regain the focus by holding off answering the question or simply asked for a minute to finish a particular task.

The customer did keep up the same routine of watching and asking during the remainder of the job, although there were points when I was left alone. I did my best at keeping to the four points mentioned above and seemed to get through the job unscathed. All tasks were completed and I did get repeat business from this customer.

There were a few times when I was waiting for loads or reboots when I was asked more questions, in which I kindly gave answers. Sometimes this required more technical answers, such as explaining the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Did answering some of these questions add time to the job? Maybe a little because it caused me to lose focus on the task at times. After this job, I thought about different ways to handle these situations and analyzed it a bit.

In addition to the points above, here is what I recommend in these types of situations:

• 1. Don’t feel threatened or offended if you feel they are accusing you or don’t trust you.
• 2. Tell them ahead of time what you are doing, the process, and potential pitfalls/problems.
• 3. Remember, they are paying for your time and knowledge. If they really want to know answers to questions, then give it to them. If it adds time to the job then I see it as a training fee.
• 4. Remain calm. This can’t be stated enough. Never lose you temper.
• 5. Communicate…say this is going to take x amount of time…I need to focus on this to make sure it’s correct…etc
• 6. Try to turn a bad situation into good. Usually there is an opportunity. If they are constantly watching you, then show them how confident and knowledgeable you are.
• 7. Use idle scanning/reboot time to educate, social engineering, security, etc
• 8. There is much you can do if they are just watching you as you don’t want to offend the customer by asking them to leave (at least in my opinion, it’s their place and their money). Confidently go about doing your job. If they ask questions, use common sense and feel out the situation. Look for polite ways to tell them that you don’t want to lose focus.

I hope this helps if you are faced with these types of situations. Remember, it’s quite common and most techs have experienced them.

How do you deal with these types of situations?