Dealing With Difficult Clients

Are you taking orders/Or are you taking over?

---The Clash

I guess I'm taking orders. Most adult men spend a large part of our day taking orders regardless of our stations in life. I'm fortunate in that my boss is humane and reasonable but unfortunate in that a sizable percentage of my clients are not. I'd estimate that 95% of our clients are reasonable and courteous while 5% are infantile, self-absorbed twits. Those are good odds, except that 80% of my time lately seems to be spent with the bottom 5%. Explaining that our platform can't perform a function that would violate the laws of physics would placate most reasonable people, you would think.

Dale Carnegie urges us to listen and empathize with outraged customers---easier said than done sometimes. Especially in this business where the customer is not always right. If I find myself agreeing with a customer over a technical issue and he's recording the conversation I could make my firm (and, by extension, me) liable for tens of thousands of dollars. So, no, the customer is not always right.

I enjoy watching one of my favorite bartenders at Nick's on Friday and Saturday night whenever a customer gets pushy. He ignores the guy (it's almost always a guy) while serving everyone else around him. The guy gets angry and throws his coaster and waves a $5 bill trying to get the bartender's attention. And he gets ignored, until he leaves.

In restaurants, it always pays to be polite. Ten years ago I had a former roommate from college move in with me while he tried to get his life in order. I lived near a Vietnamese neighborhood and my roommate was a connoissuer of Asian food, having lived in China for two years and spent time in many other Asian countries. An academically brilliant guy, but I had to explain to him why going to a restaurant wearing his Ho Chi Minh t-shirt would not be a good idea. Along the same lines, we all have "that friend" who audibly berates a waiter/ess over bad service.....

One of my favorite stories involved waiting in line at the airport. The guy in front of me was abusing the clerk in the most vile manner and the whole time the clerk just stood there, unruffled, calm, his expression never changing. When I got to the front of the line I complimented the clerk on dealing with the asshole.

"Well," said the clerk, "he's flying to Albany but I can't say for sure that that's where his luggage is going...."