How to deal with unresponsive clients?

Question

Running a business / being self-employed we all have to deal occassionally with clients who become unresponsive. E.g. you send them a UI mockup asking for feedback and all you get back is silence. You ask about some details about the feature in their application that you're working on and you don't hear from them for a month.

I try to nag them every few days by sending an email or an IM message, but it not always works. Some promise to get back to you, saying something along the lines of "sorry, I've been swamped with work recently, I will get the answers to you today" - and "today" was 5 days ago, a week ago, two weeks ago and so on. And it repeats like that.

Have you worked out some good methods of dealing with such clients? How do I 'force' them to finally move forward, so that I can resume my work on their project?

Answer 1

You don't. You just leave them and forget about them. If, after a while, they return to you and yell at you for not doing your job, explain the reason, politely yet firmly, and forget about them yet again. After few iterations, average responsiveness among remaining customers will noticeably increase.

Answer 2

In all your communication, you ensure that it's clear the ball is in their court. Something along the lines of:

As I'm sure you can understand, the project cannot advance forward from here without answers to the questions I've posed. There's perhaps one week of work I can do before the lack of this information becomes critical to timely completion of the project.

I trust you will give this your utmost attention to ensure that the deadlines can be met.

Then, when they rant, remind them politely how you stressed that the information was required.

Answer 3

Everyone has the time to do what you need of them, what they are telling you is that you are not a priority. You need to become a priority. It seems most contracts involve some form of this.

I think the trick is to only take on clients who are serious about getting work done. It really comes down to feel. Be very clear up front about milestones and the importance of fitting them into your "busy" schedule.

If you are already engaged with a client who is putting you off you should be very clear about your intentions of finishing up the project by a certain date and help them jump through the hoops by laying out the proper steps they need to take.

I have never had a repeat-ignorer eventually come through after any extended period of time. 50% of the time it has been for financial reasons and 100% of the time it has been my fault for getting involved in the first place.

Answer 4

I sort of had this experience. I wrote a document of specifications about an interface they wanted, and asked for feedback. After one year of employment, I did not have success in obtaining feedback. When I realized that there was no hope of getting any kind of review, I just did it my way, otherwise they would have blamed me of not doing anything, sooner or later.

Most of all, you have to know your client. If he is busy or lazy, if he is a blamer or a listener. There's a lot of psychology involved. You have to act on a client-by-client basis.

Answer 5

This is fairly common for me as well... If you're into contracts, make sure that your verbiage always gives an allowance to protect yourself, such as: "Project will be completed within 45 days of final approval of all design concepts" or "To be completed by 5/1/09 with final approval of design concepts by 4/1/09."

If you aren't working with written contracts as a small business, I highly suggest you start. It will make you look more professional and enhance the communication channels between you and your clients.

Answer 6

This (newer) question has a lot more suggestions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1077444/handling-difficult-clients

Answer 7

A good way of protecting the project and your hard earned profits from sloppy customers and poor client involvement is to:

• Set out project delivery ground rules explicitly as part of the contract: the way the project is going to be run, deliverables, acceptance procedure (including fit criterions), deadlines, payment terms
• Then just stick to the contract and make sure any changes to the original agreement are in writing

As an example, make it clear within the contract that initial prototype or specification is going to be delivered by e-mail/post/in person by a certain date and then the client will have to either accept the prototype or submit any constructive feedback (within the scope of the initial requirements) in a written form during the following 5 working days. Further state that in the absence of the timely and written constructive feedback the prototype or specification will be deemed as accepted and the implementation will commence.

There is nothing wrong with such a rigid approach, since any hesitation on customer's part is going to hurt your company and cost cash (it is still necessary to employ people to work on the project whilst the customer is struggling to make up their mind whenever they are able of answering the phone; it's still necessary to be able to plan holidays and production cycles; besides switching developers between tasks is costly etc). Always keep the project effort focused.

A few tips:

• Have a good contract template with an explicit description of the development process always at hand
• Sign the contract before starting any work
• Stick to the contract; keep your paperwork always up to date and well-organised (keep track of all communications, always confirm in writing anything that has been agreed verbally by sending a simple e-mail with bullet points, for example).
• Do not build the development process entirely around customer feedback, be able to do own research in the absence of customer communication and just keep executing the contract chunking out deliverables.
• Aim at doing the job to the letter of the contract. The company gets paid on its basis.
• Don’t be afraid to take non-paying customers to a court as long as you have fulfilled your contractual obligations.
• Keep improving the contract templates incorporating any feedback from completed projects.

Naturally, having the paperwork in order will drastically reduce the need for chasing-up customers. There is nothing you can do to organise the client, just do your best to keep yourself organised and, above all, your investments protected (should it be time, expenses or human-resources).

Answer 8

In the past i've found the best way is simply charge time and materials and ask the client to book your time from day x to day y. I would estimate at the start of the project it would take 45 days, plus quote a decent rate, and tell them when i could start.

Then if the resources promised aren't available you just need to escalate it early to the person paying for your time (ie: your sponsor)

I found this gave me a lot of room to move, if i decided it was taking too long and it was my or my team's problem we could suck it up and do extra hours for free to get the job done under estimate. However if the client was d*cking me around, well they were paying for it. As long as i was clearly communicating (ie: via phone or in person) what was going on, i never really had a problem.

This is how most consulting firms work. You push the risk of development back to the client, but you still have the ability modify that with your need to keep your reputation.

NB: This is over simplifying it a bit, but i would suggest you look at how you set up your contracts and how you interact with your sponsors when you have a problem. There is probably room for improvement :)