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Non-cooperative client


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Hi all,

 

Normally, I would not be the type to take clients' behavior to heart, but this one really got to me.

 

Basically, we have a client which is going through a complete restructuring of their group. This restructuring has been ongoing since January. A first half of the project was handled by my colleagues in charge (2 of them). Now, these 2 senior colleagues have taken a month break for August and handedover the client to me for this period.

 

I attended the client calls during the last 2 weeks of July, but with no actual visibility on the emails exchange between the client and them, so it was a bit of a blur. They work from their personal inboxes and I work from a shared inbox. None of these emails transited through the shared inbox until the very last week before these colleagues were due to go on vacation.

 

Consequently, the only thing I really had visibility over was trackers filled with color-coded boxes that they don't understand themselves and update whenever suitable. These trackers include several hundreds of entities and are not very reader friendly, yet are shared with the client on a bi-weekly basis.

 

Before going on holidays, my manager warned the client that I had limited knowledge of the case and they needed to be patient with me, in case I had questions or gaps. She reiterated this many times. Clearly, it didn't sink in...

 

Today, I had my conference call with the client and I was spoken to in a manner I had never been spoken to by a client before. I've been with this company for a couple of years now, received various positive reviews from senior management, sales etc ... never have had I a single client talk to me like that upon first interaction.

 

Up until this afternoon, I always made sure to answer their queries quickly and in a thorough manner, like I do with my usual clients (and I have a huge portfolio). However, I am met with a severe lack of cooperation from the client's side. For instance:

 

- During my first conference call I hosted with the client, I received a: "This tracker is crap, I don't understand what has been updated and it looks like we're not progressing at all. You need to tell me what is important. I need you to update this tracker like XYZ and do XYZ because this is not understandable. You're not doing anything and this is scary us".

 

Mind you, this is the exact same tracker my colleagues used in the past 6 months. I only update boxes when something has been finalized or a paper work has been provided. There's been no change in format and my last update was following the steps of my colleagues from last week.

 

- If I confirm something has been finalized, I will have a third party at clients' end asking me to confirm it has indeed been finalized for their "personal understanding". I mean I confirm things to clients on a daily basis, never had I ever been met with such distrust even with other big clients.

 

I'm already doing the work of 2 persons, plus my own work. I can't even have lunch and I'm on top of this spoken to like garbage by a client that I had never interacted with before. I'm not a crier at work, but I hid in the bathroom to cry earlier today because of the client's comments on the phone. When you first introduce yourself to a stakeholder, you do not speak to them like that. My parents never spoke to me like that, my teachers either, heck my boss never did. This person out of nowhere dares to tell me in front of other massive stakeholders the work is crap when I'm only following up on what my colleague did before they went on holidays?

 

Besides, they initiate changes and we do the documentation work and set ups upon their requests, so why would it be for me to advise what's important? They ask, we do. That's how I usually proceed with my clients.

 

The worst part is that they seemed to be welcoming of me when my manager mentioned me in a call (I was a silent listener). Now that she's gone, I was met with ice on the first interaction.

 

I'm honestly on the verge of putting them in the back burner. Giving them less importance. Stop catering to their emaisl/requests within the minute because clearly, it's not working out. Perhaps that will teach them that respect goes both ways. If they want a good service provider, then they shall also cooperate and provide the required respect. If they want to treat me like garbage, then they're going to get a service of the same standard.

 

How should I approach this? I still have another 3 weeks & 6 calls of this.

 

Thanks.

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OK. Well, I don't really understand what your company is doing for this client. I know it's some kind of financial stuff. But you're taking this too personally, like you're in a personal relationship with a boyfriend who was mean to you. This isn't about you, and the client doesn't care if you're doing the work of two people plus your own. And what are you doing in the bathroom crying? The client hurt your feelings? This is business. Get over it and do your job.

 

What I'm hearing is that this client isn't happy and hasn't been happy for some time. This has nothing to do with you and you need to get in touch with your supervisor and the bozos in charge of this account and tell them that the client isn't happy and they need to do something fast. That the clients think your trackers are crap. That the reports they're getting are crap. They don't understand what they're seeing and no one is explaining stuff to them. Someone needs to put this fire out before they lose these clients.

 

Maybe you're not suited to be in this business if you think that you should get revenge on the client because they spoke critically to you. They don't want to hear that your company put a junior assistant assistant in charge of their account while the main people are at the beach taking their August vacation. (In the US, some financial people don't even take vacations.)

 

The client is telling you that you need to provide them with better service, not less service. You need to get moving. Your company needs a hero, not a zero. Get in touch with your supervisors and the account managers and get moving on this. Ring the fire alarm or whatever you need to do to help this client and to keep your company from losing this client. You can earn your client's respect by fixing this mess!

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Well, I was advised by my own manager (before she went on holiday) to let the client wait a bit whenever queries would come up. She suggested that I should not be overly responsive to them.

This is not how I normally deal with my own clients at all. I like to get things done right away and never let them wait. I'm usually on top of every issue. I'm not afraid of problems. I've had clients calling me every 30 minutes for 5 days because of an issue that needed to be fixed, but was out of my hands. This didn't faze me one bit. My manager and other people have a different approach. The way I conduct my work is to put the client in priority, making them feel as though they are the only client of the bank, not just a number in a waiting line.

 

Now, this client took it out on me for some reason. I understand time restrictions, cost-effectiveness and so on. I understand this is not about me, but I don't comprehend my she is giving out to me when my manager has been sharing the same tracker & reports for 6 months now. Why did she not complain to my manager about this? If it were up to me, the tracker would not exist. Quite frankly, it is confusing for me too and I absolutely hate using it. It is indeed not reader friendly, but it is what I have been asked to provide the client on a bi-weekly basis. This is not something I came up with myself. I just provide it to be compliant, but looking at it from a client's end, it's a mess.

 

I know they don't care that I do 2 people's jobs and mine, but I was talking about myself here. Not about them. If this goes south with the client, I will have burned bridges with both this client and mine because of this single client. From a career perspective, it is a catastrophe.

 

Now, my action plan is as follows:

- Keep sending these silly trackers to remain compliant with my manager's way of working.

- Suggest an alternative to the client (meaning, reports that are not excel based, more straight forward).

- Remain as responsive as I have been thus far (I understand providing less service might create more problems, but I have been suggested to take the less service approach to educate them). I had difficult clients in the past and won them over by catering to their every need until a relationship of trust eventually grew.

 

I don't think I'm in the wrong business, but seriously, I was not expecting this type of attacks during a first call with a stakeholder. I know next to nothing about this project and was not involved in it until the last minute. This has been ongoing for 6 months, so you can imagine jumping into a group restructuring with no real background is not an easy thing either. The client is obviously not aware I was not fully prepared to undertake the project and this is my problem, but as an employee, it is an issue as it affects my performance. The client can sometimes be asking questions, to which I have no answers in the moment as no background. It's difficult.

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Well, I think you summed it up clearly in the first line of your response. Your own manager hasn't been responsive to these clients and makes them wait on answering their queries. They've been getting poor service and they're angry. And now they've thrown you, a junior assistant, at them. And they're not angry at you, they're angry at the company. If you don't do something, you're in for 6 more calls from hell.

 

You should call them up and ask them what you can do to help them. You probably want to have this alternative to a spreadsheet ready to email them while on the call as you're talking to them and ask them if this makes things clearer. Instead of sending them trackers they don't understand, and just following a failed procedure, you should do anything you can to make the trackers clear. And you should email a list of the client's concerns and questions to everyone concerned, and perhaps even to your manager's supervisor.

 

Because the way I see it, you do the 6 calls in the next 3 weeks, and when your bosses come back, the client is going to blame you for everything and you're going to be the scapegoat for your bosses. You might as well try to be helpful and try to turn this thing around, because the other way is you're going to be blamed for making the client angry.

 

So you decide which way you're going to play it!

 

I have the feeling that the client has been complaining and your manager is probably good at BS-ing them. And they probably think that you're fresh meat and you're somebody new they can complain to where their previous complaints have fallen on deaf ears.

 

Look, this is a great opportunity for you to look good and win extra brownie points.

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If your manager and the client managers on vacation have been generally unresponsive to them... and now they are getting you who IS responsive to them... they are going to push you as hard as they can to fix all of their problems because you actually listen.

 

It’s actually a compliment.

 

I know that hearing this and that sucks feels like a personal attack, but it is not. It’s an attack on the people who managed the account before you...

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Today, I came across severe issues with set ups that were done by the people of charge of this client.

 

They set up an intercompany financial instrument without asking the parameters to the client beforehand. Today, the client came back asking: "I thought the set up was XYZ". I cross-checked our files and the comment from my manager/colleagues was: "No info, set up done by default". Go explain to the client that the set up was wrongly done and the change could not be made before another week or so, knowing they need this instrument to be effective at the end of the week. Unfortunately, I had no email trace and I therefore was not able to check whether the client had actually provided the info. I'm the one having to explain a set up incorrectly done when I was not even involved.

 

Again, yesterday, I tried to set up a few products and there was no way we could proceed due to a technical set up incorrectly done. We had to look for a workaround which is unsatisfactory to me, just so we could send contracts across.

 

I ended up sending an overview email to the client with a simplified tracker and although I didn't even get a thank you or acknowledgement from the tough lady from yesterday, it started moving things. The client started returning documentation that had been pending from before my colleagues went on vacation. I clearly explain to the client what was pending on our end and on theirs to move forward.

 

My manager solely sent the tracker and focused on the information in the calls, but this is probably why the work has been so scattered. The client probably never reads those trackers. They thus had no idea where they were at, except from when my manager told them "This is done". Even when it couldn't be done within the dedicated time-frames, my manager would just say: Sorry, we're not ready.

 

My manager is like my mentor, but I'm not the only one seeing the cracks. A couple of people who also came across the set ups realized those were incorrectly done. It took me a good week to figure out where everything was located and where we were at.

 

In my manager's team, there are also 2 other senior employees. However, instead of assigning the client to them, she assigned it to me. I think they probably declined as they didn't want to be part of this mess.

 

I think the first week was mainly clearing the inconsistencies.

 

I'm not an assistant by the way :)

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