Tough Customers: How do you handle them?

[wyattnorton]

I work in the landscaping business. I have been mentoring under this man who has been working the business for 30+ years.

Whenever there is a customer/client that is tough, questions, desires control, etc. the man puts them in their place. This can be done by scolding, nasty emails, confrontation, or anger.

Most of these clients obey but it does not seem like they are too inclined to repeat business.

Of course this sounds like a no brainer that it is bad, but I have an example of a "useful" time and would love to hear more insight into your own experiences.

For one of our jobs, we demoed an above ground pool with a deck and filled it with dirt. During the end of the demo phase, the customer emailed this man asking a question regarding an electric box attached to one of the posts under the deck, saying it was exposed and why was it taken out? When the man heard about this he called his employee the next morning and asked him about it. The employee said that he was told by the man to take the post out because it was attached to the deck.

Upon arriving to the job, the client was outside and the man went right up to him. He told him that he is the captain and cannot have a client trying to run the show because it causes confusion and conflict between him and his employees. This confrontation of the client was more calm and the client understood why he needed to be out of the way and not try to guide the employees.

My question to you all is: If there have been situations in your business with tough clients like this, I would love to hear about them and how you mitigated any problems/challenges that arose? If you could have done it differently, how would you approach it now?

Thanks,
Wyatt

 

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[Mathuin]

Whenever there is a customer/client that is tough, questions, desires control, etc. the man puts them in their place. This can be done by scolding, nasty emails, confrontation, or anger.

This seems stupid. Almost every issue can be dealt with calmly and politely but firmly.

Having as much as you can in writing helps

Most of these clients obey but it does not seem like they are too inclined to repeat business.

If someone was reacted the way you described above to me, I wouldn't want to do business with them again.

 

[Ing]

Sorry, I think we are not the right partner for you. If yo don’t like me, tell it and save time for us both.

Saying thatI never lost a customer I like to keep.

 

[Johnny boy]

We don't do large projects because there is a lopsided legal relationship between client and contractor.

Karen hires me to come build her a deck, I need to have a contractor's bond for tens of thousands of dollars.
She tells me she wants something different halfway through and shouldn't have to pay for it.
I show her an obvious, blatant, clearly worded contract that explains exactly why she is a complete cunt.
She blasts my company online with reviews, then goes after my bond. She tells the bond company "I didn't get what I paid for" and the bond company, not giving a shit about protecting contractor interests, hands over $10,000 to Karen and then turns to me and says "pay up bitch".
If she paid for anything upfront with a credit card, she calls up Amex and says "I didn't like the service" and amex immediately sends her the money back and pulls it directly out of my bank account and demands I send proof to fight her chargeback.
I show all documents, contracts, work photos, etc to amex to fight the chargeback and amex says "tough shit" in their most polite corporate voice.
I file a small claims case for the money I am owed and hear back that the next availability for a small claims case in my county is 8 months from now.
If this happens twice, my payment processor labels me a high risk merchant and bans me from processing card transactions if my chargeback rate goes above 2%, literally 1 out of 50 people. The Karen ratio of clients is usually about 5%+ at a minimum. Good luck surviving.

Consumer protections!
The only tool you get is filing a lien, make sure you use it every time.

Instead of that garbage, we offer simple recurring maintenance. We signup a customer and have contracts with a 2-month cancellation fee. We signup a ton of people in the spring and any shitty Karen that has an attitude gets replaced. Cards are charged at the beginning of the month so we are always paid before we work. As we build up customers our transaction number skyrockets so we have thousands of good transactions throughout the year so if any Karen does a chargeback it means nothing. They get a couple hundred bucks back and we replace them with a good customers. It hardly ever happens.

Each year we filter out all of the bad customers. We are left with a boatload of nice, pleasant, understanding people who pay us well and every new crew we add we go through that filtering process again.

We combat it somewhat by setting expectations before the quote even happens. Every person who schedules a quote knows beforehand there's a 12 month contract and a 2-month early termination fee. It weeds out people who are looking to screw someone over. They usually move on to another more naive company who they can take advantage of.

Nobody sues over $200, we do small yards and our primary value is convenience, reliability, communication, etc. That naturally attracts people who are simply too busy and don't want to worry about the yard. Those kind of customers are not going to be picky and annoying, they just want the grass to stay short and never worry about us not showing up. They don't want to be writing checks or leaving cash under the mat and it's convenient for us as well.

We do simple work so it's easy to hire people and easy to train them. We can put out an ad and get a guy out there working and trained in a couple days.

The primary way we deal with a**hole customers is to use contracts, upfront communication, filtering and qualifying before the quotes are even given, then showing them their contract that says they're about to end up in collections if they don't pay their termination fee. That handles most of them. Then we just replace them with nice, pleasant customers. The result is hundreds and hundreds of customers paying us over half a million a year and only one part time customer service rep who doesn't spend all day getting yelled at by some rude miserable bitch. Punish the bad people and move on quickly, fill your pipeline with awesome, new customers.

You need to have a woman dealing with customers. Men are not built for customer service.

The idea of companies serving customers and being their slaves is a falsehood, perpetuated by advertising and marketing. You have something people need. They should be happy and thankful that you decided to go through the trouble of creating a business that satisfies their needs. People who start companies with the idea that you are subservient to the customer are stuck thinking like consumers because tv and social media has trained you to think that way. That's why normal people who start businesses often get stuck being slaves. They are still in the same mindset as a consumer employee normal person. They are not thinking properly yet. You are never told to put your own interests first because there's no incentive for anyone else to tell you that. Only other experienced business owners telling you advice personally will tell you things like this.

All of this sounds like we are a mean company. We aren't. We regularly thank our customers and lower their prices when we see their visits are taking less time than expected, we send gift baskets when customers refer us, we have a 4.6 average review rating on google without asking for reviews and being annoying, we pay our employees well and pay them for 8 hours a day of work when they only work 6 hours and finish early.

But the idea is that you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish. You need to make sure bad people are not rewarded within your organization, and good people are celebrated.

Then, you'll be able to make enough profit to actually scale, and you'll be able to solve a lot more peoples' problems instead of just a few that you are slaves to. Wouldn't you rather help 1 million nice people instead of helping 50 nice people and being a slave to 20 as well and never being able to grow?

 

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[wyattnorton]

Then, you'll be able to make enough profit to actually scale, and you'll be able to solve a lot more peoples' problems instead of just a few that you are slaves to. Wouldn't you rather help 1 million nice people instead of helping 50 nice people and being a slave to 20 as well and never being able to grow?

I feel that 100%. It also seems like when you focus on the clients that are good and pay, especially with maintenance accounts, it creates an easy and repeatable business.

However, we have moved away from maintenance because it is such a cheap market with all the illegals and their companies. Any Jose or Jos-b can just create a shitty lawncare service company, so now we focus on landscape designs because it has higher profit margins and most people cannot do it like we do, especially with quality, keeping up with municipality codes, etc.

The one thing that I like about the business owner I partnered with is his contracts. He stipulates that he will be able to start 30-45 days from contract signing, the payment schedule, his 5 year & 1 year warranty, and other legalities with plant/tree death if not watered.

There are always issues of clients wanting to changed and add shit mid-job, but the way it is handles is usually cordial because there comes more money. However, there was this one a**hole who want to basically double the work for the job, my business partner said the price for that specific part of the contract (brick paver walkway) would be exactly double because it is the same material and basically same area.

The customer proceeded to freak out and told my partner to get the F*ck off his property, so we did. Now the customer is leaving nasty reviews and attempting to have legal action take place.

Which is whatever because we also have a client we just did an estimate for that we already did an awesome brick patio for early this summer.

It seems like a give and take with these customers, especially with not being a slave. You must listen and understand their point of view, but what I am getting @Johnny boy is that you have to be the man as well. You cannot let the customer be the man or else they'll end up F*cking you because they "think" they know better and they actually don't.

One line my partner uses is, "I am not a good (enter customers job title) and I am not going to pretend like I am. So, you don't do that either and we'll get along just fine."