Deal With Difficult Clients With These 5 Simple Steps

Despite the fact that they have gone to the good grace to hire you or subcontract your services, clients aren’t always the most beneficent and professional people to work with. Sometimes, they can be plain difficult and can provide you with headaches to last months if not years. This is to be expected if you work in a freelance or contracting capacity. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed. In the nature of your work you’re likely to come across thousands of people with thousands of different personalities, and so navigating only the friendly ones is pretty unlikely.

Once you do come across difficult clients, it can be hard to deal with. However, you can overcome the difficulties if you keep your head about you and proceed in the most professional way possible The following tips will help you just do that. Some are responsive, some are preventative, and all are valuable.

Insure

The first and best step to covering yourself when these instances occur is protecting yourself with adequate indemnity insurance. Firms such as Kingsbridge www.kingsbridge.co.uk offer these protections that can also work retroactively to cover you for issues that might arise from jobs already completed. You can never be certain when a dragon will raise its head in the working world, and so shielding  yourself with adequate protection will stop you from getting as financially burnt as it breathes fire.

Avoid Emotions

Possibly the first social step in addressing a situation in which a client is vocal and potentially nasty about work you’ve completed is to totally avoid an emotional response. This is easier said than done, especially when your competency is being questioned, and everything you have built is seemingly criticized by someone with no formal training it the discipline or craft itself. It’s not difficult to imagine just how pleasing an initial cutting response might feel, but it will never, never, never be worth doing.

Responding emotionally can delegitimize your position, and can accelerate the issue to lawsuits and police reports before you even have a chance to respond professionally. Keep a sturdy upper lip and deal with the complaint as you would if working for a firm you had no emotional attachment to.

Respond Professionally

Avoiding emotions isn’t the same as responding professionally. Responding professionally takes a degree of wisdom, forethought, knowledge, and clarity of vision. You need to understand all of the nuances in that select case and explain your position calmly and competently. You should let the client know that there is always room for resolution and that it should be the first intended goal for both of you. If spoken to like their complaint matters and is of paramount importance to you, clients are much less likely to seek compensation through litigation or some other form of negative press thrown at you.

If they are still completely incompetent in coming to a form of reasonable exchange with you, continue communicating in a professional manner. While you have saved all the logs of communication between yourself, you will be able to show to the court that you did everything in your power to stay on the same page with the individual in question, and sometimes that is more than enough to help resolve the issue in the judge’s eyes.

Rectify

If you can come to some form of arrangement, it might be worth taking a hit in your business costs to go and rectify the issue for free – even if you believe yourself to be in the right. You should never feel exploited or bullied, but sometimes overcoming a tricky situation with a little more free labor or material cost can actually be well worth its weight in terms of the contrary resolution solving the matter will require. If that still doesn’t please, the judge will look favorably on you and your effort to resolve the issue at your own personal cost. You might not even have to use the insurance you have protected yourself with at this instant, keeping your premiums low.

Document

The most solid step in any form of business discourse is the ability to document every step you make. Make copies of the contract, the invoices, the communications and any other piece of documentation you have that might prove your case against a difficult or vindictive client. If needs be, you can then go on the offensive as opposed to the defensive, and highlight flaws in the way your client has communicated with you, misled you or otherwise impeded progress in the resolution. No matter how you proceed, documentation should always be there to back you up and will be your most faithful ally.

Keep on top of these tips while staying wise to make the most of this situation, and minimize its damaging nature.