Podcast Episode Details

Negative Customer Relations

Episode 27

In this episode we discuss the difficult conversations we all face when dealing with customers including pricing, misunderstandings, and more. Segment 1 - Saying No

• Sometimes customers relations aren’t just selling them on your latest theme, service, or skill - there comes a time where you have to deal with intricacies that have a negative connotation attached to them
• Specifically these are often: pricing, value (of work and of the product to the customer), bad content (low quality images, bad copy, etc.) - essentially you’re saving them from themselves, their web presence should start out on the right foot when you’re done with it

• Pricing
• • Pricing is almost always a major point of contention between you and your customer
  • People always want a lower price, and they’ll try anything to get it
  • The issue with you constantly lowering your price is that even if you don’t intentionally do this, you will have a lesser quality product because your motivation to complete it will drop.
  • Scope creep (customers adding features onto the original scope of the project) is especially bad when you’re doing a project and being underpaid - and the outcome will be of lesser quality
  • You should go into a pricing meeting with a price range in your head, or one solid price if you aren’t willing to negotiate, and stick to the plan. If the customer is unwilling to pay a price that you’re okay with, then you just have to back out politely (this isn’t gonna work, thanks for your time)
  • When it comes to older businesses, or specifically ones that don’t run off the internet, they have issues paying for online services like web development because their business doesn’t generally value the web too much

• Value
• • Value and pricing go hand-in-hand, everyone wants what they paid for and preferably a low price on a high value
  • Sell customers on the value of your work can be difficult depending on how much they rely on their website
  • For example, if a company if almost completely reliant on their eCommerce site then upgrading it - even for a high price - may be something they’re willing to do to ensure the revenue keeps flowing
  • On the flip side, if you are working with a customer that simply has an online presence, like a basic website with a phone number - they’ll generally generate their customer via other means (newspapers, word of mouth, billboards, etc.) and therefore will value their online presence less.
  • When you have a customer that doesn’t value your services much, often times the project will be less complex, however, they won’t offer you a fair dollar for it because it doesn’t generate them enough business to pay for itself over the short term.
  • Sometimes a customer is looking to become more active online, which is why you were contacted, but they still don’t know the value of a good online presence, what it takes to generate traffic, how to manage social media, etc. In this case it can be very difficult to get a customer on-board with a price that you’re good with, versus the amount of work he wants done to become relevant online because they don’t understand the value of the work you’ll be doing for them

• Bad Content
• • We’ve all been there, you’ve been hired to look at an old website that was designed for old SD monitors, you come up with a plan to revitalize it which results in a list of photos and other content that you require

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    Published on 6 years, 10 months ago