How to Deal With Clingy Customers

Have you ever had a clingy customer?

A clingy customer is generally categorized as someone who calls you very frequently about small problems they could have figured out themselves; or call you at inappropriate times.
So why don’t we just get rid of them?

Because often they are often our “bread and butter client” and generate a lot of work for us, so we want to look after them.

Here is a guide on how to deal with these clingy customers.

You want them to get the message that you are a business and you do this to make money, but you also want to provide great customer service to them and feel they are being looked after. Here are a few ways where you can achieve both.

Set boundaries by setting a time limit per call:

I personally don’t mind helping out my good clients over the phone. If the problem can be fixed with a few clicks of the button I always try and help them out. However, if I can’t fix it over the phone in under 10 minutes I will tell them that I’ll have to come out and look at it in order to fix it.

Two things can happen with this; either you turn it into paid work or the problem isn’t big enough for them to want to pay for.

I once got a call from a client who had some printer problems. She rung me up after hours and asked for my help and told me it was very important to get her printer working because her son has school exams. She asked me “can you please talk me though what to do?”; and since I did not want to leave her hanging being so important to her, I spend 10 minutes trying to diagnose what is wrong and talk her though the usual printer troubleshooting steps until I determined that I won’t be able to fix it without being onsite. In fact, since she was good client I was more than happy to work after hours for her and I said that I can head out there right away. Surprisingly, she declined.

Apparently it was important enough for a freebie over the phone but not important enough to pay for a visit.

Set boundaries by not answering:

When one of my clients becomes a “regular”, I usually enter their name into my phone so I know who’s calling before I pick up. If they call me at 9pm on a Saturday night, I won’t answer my phone. However, I will call them back at the earliest “acceptable” time. If you keep this up they will eventually learn that you won’t pickup outside of certain work hours and won’t call during those hours. It is highly recommended that you have voicemail on your phone if you decide to go about it this way and you must call them back or risk losing the client.

Make it more work for them:

When you help a client for free over the phone for many different small things, it’s like fast food. “Calling out” and getting fast food is quicker and easier than getting out the pots and pans and cooking at home. If calling you is quick and easy, they will most likely keep on doing it instead of spending some time and learning for themselves.

If you want to help out these clients for free, get them to write you an email explaining the problems that are occurring in detail. This takes out the quick and easy element because it takes time and thought. Often, the small problem won’t be big enough for them to bother writing an email about it and it allows you to respond to it on your time.