The Client From Hell

August 25, 2007 in business online marketing, copy writing, small business marketing, web copy writing | No comments

We’ve all had them. Clients who are never satisfied, or everything is all wrong, and who criticize your work (even thought they hired you because they don’t know a thing about what you do).

What do you do with someone like that? Well, here’s what I did.

Normally, when I send a finished copy-writing job to a client, they respond within a day or two. Usually, their reactions range between, “Wow! This is fabulous!” to “I don’t get it”.

(I always try to reach outside a client’s industry norms to find a unique approach that makes them stand out from the crowd. Sometimes they get it and sometimes they just want to be a carbon-copy of their biggest competitors.)

Anyway, I sent a client his complete website copy. I didn’t hear back from him for almost two weeks so I assumed he was happy with it. (My first big mistake). So I sent him an invoice. (Mistake number two).

As soon as that invoice hit my client’s inbox, he was on the phone to me absolutely irate.

He claimed I’d used the industry terms all wrong, I put the wrong product and services on the wrong pages, and he said my Home page didn’t make any sense at all and he didn’t even know where that was supposed to be.

My first inclination was to get defensive. I did a lot of research on those industry terms and I had a legitimate marketing reason for everything I wrote. However, I bit my tongue and told him, “I don’t like unhappy customers. How can I make this right?”

I always give customers one free re-write for anything they aren’t happy with or are uncomfortable with. But we were obviously way past that. He told me he was going to have his engineer write all the copy. But he acknowledged his engineer was no writer. How much would I want to polish up his writing?

I quoted a ridiculously low number and we hung up. About a week later, he sent me the complete website copy written by his engineer. I went through it and polished it up as best I could and added sub-heads and bulleted some of the text to make it more scan-able.

Then I looked at the Home page. It was the typical ‘we are great, we really know our stuff, you should use us’ I see on most web pages written by amateurs. I knew it would turn visitors off immediately.

So, figuring that the client was cooled off enough now to listen to me, I wrote a very carefully worded email to the client telling him that his engineer did a fine job on the product and services pages that only required a little modifying to make it work on a website.

However, I told him that a Home page for a company like his should actually introduce visitors to their products and services with just enough information to intrigue them and then a “More…” link to pull them deeper into the site. I also suggested we add “calls to action” in with text with either links to the Contact form or a name and phone number to call to find out if this was really the right solution for them.

He called me the next day saying he’d talked it over with his engineer and my arguments made sense for the Home page. I immediately rewrote the Home page almost exactly as I’d originally written it. I sent it with the other pages and the client was very happy. He even sent me a link to the site when it was up so I could see it. He was pleased and proud of his site and excited about the future work it would bring him.

Now, will he be out there bragging about my services? Probably not. However, he won’t be out there bad-mouthing my services either. Okay, so I only made enough off of that job for a dinner for two at a fast-food restaurant. But what would have happened to my future earning power if I’d let this situation turn a client into an enemy?

Oh, and what did I learn? When you assume, it makes an…

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