Ask HN: Our client is abusive, What can we do?

[suhair]

We recently onboarded a US client for our company. This client was doing development in another company for the last 5 or so years and approached us for further development of that product. That product was developed with no documentation and we asked time for understanding the system and picking up the small user stories along the way. He was nice till starting the project. We are barely into the 3rd month of development and now he is abusing our employees in languages that could not be posted in any platform. These abuses are for the errors already existing in that platform and we are not responsible ; that we can prove anywhere. How can we deal with this situation. Our company is very new and just completed 1 year now. We are in no way dependent on this client for our survival and what will be the best way to escape from such a mess?

[46Bit]

> what will be the best way to escape from such a mess?

You have a few options:

1. Do nothing. Your most employable staff will leave to escape the abuse.

2. Try to manage the relationship. For instance have all communication go through one person who is empowered to terminate the contract. Set boundaries that if they behave abusively you will terminate the contract. If the client is heavily reliant on you, consider raising your price immediately as you're going to be doing a lot more work than you'd expected.

3. Dump the client immediately. Your staff will thank you but may worry about the company's viability.

4. Keep the client for now (maybe do #2), very actively look for alternate work, and bring the contract to a close once you have new clients.

Whatever you do, express clearly to your staff that this behaviour is not OK, and share what you can about how you are going to shield them from it.

[tubularhells]

What he said. If you don't act, people who make to your company will leave. Fire the client before you need to hire new people.

[throwarayes]

Firing an abusive client reinforces how much you care for your employees. Put their needs first and you’ll be repaid with their loyalty and trust.

I would rather have no business than one that needs abusive clients. Luckily we’re blessed in this field with many employment options.

[gus_massa]

> We are in no way dependent on this client for our survival and what will be the best way to escape from such a mess?

Make your lawyer review the paperwork you already have signed, and cancel the contract.

(Alternative: Make your lawyer review the paperwork and raise your price 10 fold.)

[suhair]

"In no way dependent" means we are not absolutely depending on this one. This will have an impact on us for a short time for sure as we have acquired new resources and have blocked existing resources. We need to explore the options. If there is no middle ground, obviously, we need to get rid of this client. I am not getting the alternative you have put forth, out of curiosity, on what ground we will be asking; for hearing the abuses?; then this 10x will not be enough :)

[rasz]

I am starting to understand your client a bit.

"In no way dependent" actually does mean _absolutely not dependent_. How often do you conflate meanings when dealing with this client? Are you/your company offshore? from another culture(Asia) perhaps? Some people have no patience for soft lies.

[suhair]

We have several communication channels and all things are updated daily in details to the client. All the work items are tracked and what we have done could be checked. No soft lies for the client. We have openly communicated everything to the client.Yes we are from different culture (Asia).

[gus_massa]

> on what ground we will be asking; for hearing the abuses?; then this 10x will not be enough :)

Then charge 100x :)

You can charge whatever you want, if there is someone that is willing to pay it. You can charge a different rate to each client. (Check what have you signed.)

Take a look at these old posts of patio11. It's about a single person consulting, but I think they can be extended to a small group. https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin... and https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick...

[tednash]

Simple.

Remove him/her.

Under no circumstance would I allow anyone at my company to abuse their power, and abuse other people.

As long as you have very clear evidence of his/her gross miss conduct, then I would terminate your contract.

[suhair]

Yes that removing is simple at first. Whenever we onboard a client we are taking a small risk by allocating and blocking the resources. This might not be a problem for big and medium sized companies but for a budding company like us this has a hidden effect. We would have been devastated if this was our first or second client.

[runawaybottle]

Some people like special treatment. Is there anyone on your team wiling to act as a buffer to soak in the bile? Have them be the point of contact and have them say whatever will appease this person’s ego, e.g ‘Yeah, you are 100% right, you know if you want my opinion I think this stuff should be done, I will try to go to bat for you’ and just have this person regularly communicate and provide special treatment to this ego (an account manager). Have all contact go through this person and see if they can wrangle the ego on the other side to find reasonable compromises.

Money is money, this client didn’t take their money away, right? That’s the only thing that matters. De-escalate the situation and have a nanny comfort the idiot parting with his money - play it smarter, silo off communication from the the rest of the team and have it go through the nanny (and pay the nanny a bonus later for managing the situation). If the current point of contact is not working, have them become the bad cop, and throw in a good cop temporarily. Have bad cop always deliver the obvious requirements, have good cop deliver their special requests. In fact, reset the relationship with the good cop and just have him/her straight up appeal to the client ‘we believe this project can be handled better’.

But don’t send away the money if it’s not walking away on it’s own.

[lumpa]

This sounds like a risky approach. There are many ways this could backfire, from burning out the buffer person to creating a culture of prioritizing bad clients. Not saying it's impossible to routinely handle abusive customers and make a consistent profit, just that's a risky proposition that takes special (not necessarily in a positive way) talent to pull off.

[runawaybottle]

All good points, the only thing I’ll say about the notion of ‘good clients’ is that, usually, you have to work your way up to good clients. This is true even if you are just an ordinary person looking for a job, you will need a framework to handle low paying or minimal growth roles.

When you only have a handful of clients, even the shittiest one matters. Setting standards for what you will or won’t put up with this early may not be optimal. Getting the framework in place internally for your team to identify the problem clients, keeping the toxicity transparent and distributed through proper heatsinks will lead to the more organic evolution of what you will or will not put up with from a client when money is involved.

So part of the framework could actually mean de-prioritizing the client’s work internally, while prioritizing communication and expectations for some time. You could also boost morale of your team by requiring sign off from leadership on every little deliverable to show that you acknowledge the problem and those managing it internally.

[suhair]

Yes, this makes perfect sense. If we get a middle ground solution, it will be good. De-escalating looks good on paper, but we are dealing a monster here; When i say abusive, it is not like martin scorese or tarantino films level. It is beyond that. I like your idea about "nanny" but withstanding this person might be asking for lot from a nanny.

[notdang]

If it's that bad, try to confront the bad behavior, pointing out what they are doing and why it's unacceptable. Usually the abusive people are not used to being confronted and calm down when it happens. At least for a while.

[PEOPLEgetoff]

You can allow your client to express their displeasure, but I draw the line when it gets personal.

There’s a limit to how much you can and should take. The client can yell and scream all they want about the product. But if they cross that line and turn it into a personal attack, I step in and put an end to it.

[andix]

What I would do:

1. Protect your people, only let the most resilient people deal with this customer, and only if they are okay with it. In our old company we had an ex-military officer, who would've been capable of dealing with such people and strong language.

2. Try to set boundaries: "This language/those arguments are not helpful. Let's end this meeting/call now and continue tomorrow/next week", then hang up or throw him out.

3. Get the hell out of the contract, ASAP. Never do business with him again.

[stphn2013]

Keep records of every communication with this person, all emails, phone records, etc

Have an urgent meeting and discuss your concerns. Make it clear their abuse is not appropriate and will not be tolerated. Tell them you will have no option but to discontinue the project if they continue.

[suhair]

We are collecting all the videos and text abusive communications now. Have a ton of them now. We are looking for a way to strongly communicate to the client that we will not be tolerating this. We prepared an email but that that seems trivial compared to what he has done through his text and video communications.

[malux85]

Email is inappropriate because its easy to "hide" behind an email. Video call them and enumerate his abuse list while looking them in the eye. Quote their language word for word back to them and if this doesn't embarrass them straight away ask them to justify the language and then whatever they answer, tell them its not acceptable.

Put the spotlight directly on them and reveal the behaviour unambiguously - video call, not email.

[superbcarrot]

You seem to have been really patient with them, probably to a fault. It would have been best to speak to them after the first instance of this and then drop the client altogether if they had continued.

[suhair]

Yes, our project manager was taking all the hits as this was a new project and hoping that the situation will change. Now he has shared us a few sample communications and we could not even hear the first few minutes of videos.

[WheelsAtLarge]

All companies have a breaking point where the customer is not worth the trouble. You might have reached that point. Fire the customer, plan to break all ties with as little pain as possible.