“Can I meet you in the morning” was the request.
Oh no.. from the tone I felt a complaint coming – I wondered what was wrong.
This was a really good account and we were just at the early stages of working with this client. The project was quite complex, which involved quite a few members of our team.
There were quite a number of elements to the project including graphic design, web design, social media, event management, internal communications and PR. We pride ourselves on being able to handle all of these in-house, which is a real strength of ours.
Our team had been briefed well and each of us were working diligently on our own part of the project and liaising directly with the client.
Our relationship had started off in a really positive manner so I was really concerned and confused that something could be wrong.
We met and sure enough our client expressed a concern about how things were going with the project.
The client’s problem was really simple – While we were all quite clear about what we were doing he was overwhelmed by the correspondence and interaction from so many people on so many different aspects of the project. Collectively we were able to handle the huge variety of tasks but this was just way too confusing for him.
To alleviate this problem we arranged that all of our correspondence would come through just one person and we organised it in such a way that we were only dealing with one aspect at a time – while this did not seem like the most efficient way of dealing with things for us it was the best way as it worked for him.
This approach has been working out great and the project has been progressing really well since.
While we all hate complaints they are in fact precious gifts.
A customer instead of staying silent and suffering with a scenario that isn’t working for them has taken a huge step and communicated that something is wrong.
Take the complaint, listen attentively to it, understand it, embrace it and deal with it – complaints are precious gifts that can only make you better.
Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion
Fuzion are a Marketing, PR and Graphic Design agency in Ireland with offices in Cork and Dublin
