5 Strategies for Dealing with a Nightmare Customer

Every business encounters them: the nightmare customer. After working with more than 1,200 homeowners, here are a few tips for navigating these unique individuals.

We’ve all met them. You know exactly whom I’m referring to. People we come across in business that are, unequivocally, difficult and unreasonable.

No, I’m not just talking about challenging people, people with high expectations, or even those who are unfriendly or cold. No, I’m talking about the ones that keep you up at night, that you wish you would have never met, that you wonder how they have even navigated life thus far without an “unfortunate accident” befalling them.

If you’re in business, you’ll eventually work for one. And depending on your business, you’ll work for quite a few. It’s really a numbers game, in my opinion. And while there are ways to filter them out (oooh, there’s another newsletter topic!), sometimes we just have to deal with them.

Here are five strategies for doing so.

Strategy 1: Look At Yourself First

While unreasonable customers certainly exist, I’d say half the stories I’m told about them have me thinking in the back of my mind, “um, I think maybe you are partly to blame in this, too.”

It’s easy to excuse our poor business practices by labeling the customer as unreasonable. And while this label very well could be the ending point, I suggest it not be the starting point.

Because here’s what I’ve found: even the most unreasonable of customers often have at least a kernel of truth in their criticism or dissatisfaction. I firmly believe the responsibility of a business is to smoke these out, put them on the IDS (you have an IDS because you run on EOS, right?), and resolve them.

If you’re going to deal with an unreasonable person and endure the pain, you might as well get better for it.

Strategy 2: Don’t Confuse Fault with Responsibility

At kitchen & bath CRATE and TBS, this is a common refrain.

While many things an unreasonable customer points out are not our fault, many are our responsibility.

What’s the difference?

If something is our fault, it means we caused it.

If something is our responsibility, it means we must fix it, no matter who or what caused it.

Many business owners, especially contractors, stop at the “fault” test. Once they determine an issue is not their fault, they pass the buck, go dark, get combative, or do various childish things.

Instead, we should remember why people hire us and why our business profits. Profit is a fee we must earn for taking responsibility and making things right, even if it’s not our fault.

Strategy 3: Turn off Text, Turn on Email

So you’ve looked in the mirror first and taken full responsibility, and the customer is still being a thorn in your side?

It’s time to turn off the texting and turn on the email.

Texting is the most necessary evil to face business in the last decade. It’s a terrible form of communication and is misused 99% of the time. I abhor it, actually, for business use. But, alas, it’s what customers use, and there’s no way around it.

So when things get dicey, I suggest our team switch to email-only communicaion by sending this text.

“Good evening, Herb. I think it’s best if we move all future communication to email. Doing so will help us to resolve your concerns more effectively. So I’ll email you now, and we can pick up from there in the morning. Thank you!”

Then do not respond to another of their texts again other than to say, “Thank you for this message; please review my email response.”

Transitioning to email does a few things:

• It’s easier to respond in long form when needed.

• It’s easier to add attachments, especially PDFs.

• Email inherently has a “cooling off period” between messages, as people rarely expect an immediate response.

• Email is a more effective “paper trail” should litigation be necessary.

Once your “email only” strategy is in place, a post-interaction email should document every call and meeting with the unreasonable customer. Every single one. This ensures expectations are clear and gives you ammunition for future conflict.

Strategy 4: Consider the Role of “Extenuating” Circumstances

Sadly, sometimes substance abuse and mental health come into play.

For the former, this is often apparent when interactions during business hours are vastly different than those in the late evening or on weekends. While it’s impossible to truly know, it’s a reasonably safe guess when you see these patterns often enough.

And for the latter, well, of course, it’s impossible to know. But I’d be remiss not to mention mental health as a factor in business-client relationships. It’s a factor in every relationship, and this one is no different.

We can’t forget that we’re working for humans. And humans are complicated. And while it’s “just business,” we can’t dismiss our humanity. We need to treat those struggling, no matter how hard they are making our life, with compassion and respect.

Strategy 5: Swallow Your Pride and Appease

At the end of the day, appeasing a customer’s unreasonable wishes is almost always the quicker, less costly, and more productive route than entering a legal battle.

No doubt, introducing your legal council to the situation might be needed, but lawsuits and such will almost always cost you more time, money, and mental anguish than just appeasing and moving on.

The most common rebuttal I hear to this advice is, “it’s the principal of the issue.” The second most common is “they’ll just think they can get away with this stuff in the future.”

It’s not a business’s job to teach principles, nor are we the local sheriff handing down justice. Instead, our responsibility is to our employees and shareholders, and that should be the sole filter we use in settling disagreements with difficult customers.

While I hope your run-ins with nightmare customers are few and far between, I hope these strategies offer a bit of direction when the inevitable crazy train rolls into the station.

Books of Note: 

Just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia, and it was classic Gladwell: thought-provoking, disrupting of my preconceived notions, and masterfully written. I read the actual printed book, but I’d choose the audio version if I were to do it over again. He’s such a gifted speaker, and the book was essentially a transcript of a long-form podcast. So consuming in its “native state” might have been even better!

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