When working with demanding customers or clients, what advice do you have for managing high-stress and high-tension external relationships to achieve a common ground and resolve barriers to communication, alignment on expectations, or expectations around deliverables or work products?
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CIOa month ago
The best strategy in my experience is communicating and knowing more of each other. One of my customers once raised a difficult IT request for simplifying their warehouse operations. Our warehouse manage visited them to understand the background and suggested a solution with little effort, finally it came to a happy ending. On the other hand, if customer knows you better when you always show the willingness to support, they may raise more reasonable requests. In the mean time, your account sales plays an important role to bridge you and customer for better communication. We could expect more business when you offer best services to customers, then we can reach a win-win situation. Director of IT21 days ago
Choose the right contact person - not everyone gets along with everyone and is able to remain patient and calm in stressful situations.Try to understand the customer's perspective, their needs and concerns. Listen to them. Read between the lines: try to understand their motivations and emotions.
Take their feedback and develop the ideas together. But be clear on what you can and cannot do. Calibrate the expectations, define what an acceptable service level would look like.
VP of Supply Chain11 days ago
Transparency and understanding of the problem to solve is key. Contracting on what the discussions and the expectations from this relationship should look like is a good first step in any relationship. Once in the middle of it, what works for me is to think ‘3rd person’ as if I am someone else and have a specific issue, and ask myself what would that someone else do. That helps me on neutralize my feelings and be more strategic by assessing what do I know/don’t know and what the other person knows/ don’t know in regards to the problem we need to solve. Having that clarity forces the diligence and preparation for the next conversation and, in many cases, alignment through common understanding and alignment of the issue and what to expect. High demand and tension could be displayed because of different reasons – timing, budget, capabilities, etc. Typically timing and budget are solvable as you know your boundaries and seek to understand your external partner boundaries. Capabilities (required to deliver) is harder to assess and to tackle. If that is the case, first understand the need and where the tension is coming from ; then, confirming if you have the capabilities to deliver (through your team or yourself) is key. There is a possibility that your client is testing your capabilities to deliver because they are uncomfortable with what they are hearing.Director of IT11 days ago
When my team/program engages particularly demanding customers or clients, our first option is to strive to create a very tight connection between that client and one (and only one) person on our team. No surprise we choose our highest social IQ individuals to engage these demanding clients. That one person works to learn as quickly as possible what really matters to the client and how best to communicate with them. This person then serves as the liaison between the client and our team. The highest priority for this liaison is to develop an ever deeper understanding of and connection to the client. There are instances when depending on the personality of the client we use an exact opposite approach and work to immerse the client with our entire team.
As for choosing which approach to adopt, if we feel the client is very certain about what they want and when they want it, we go with the first option. The less certain the client appears, the more we lean to the second.