A Discussion about Content

In the midst of the a client crisis the best thing to do is keep your cool.  One of my many roles has been the escalation point for my clients.  Perhaps it is the fact that i just don’t get emotional and can deal with the facts.  Perhaps it is my experience having been a client for so many years that the empathy comes naturally.  What ever the reason, let me give some tips on how to deal with an escalation.

1. Focus on the solution: The moment you get the frustrated, irate, or irrational client on the other end of the phone, your primary mission is to get it resolved.  Don’t get into the blame game at that moment.  I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people go directly into blaming a 3rd party, the client, the consultant or whom ever, just to wash their hands of the problem. Fact is this figure out what the problem is, deal with the solution, and worry about laying the responsibility of it on someone, once you have the facts, and the crisis is over.  99.9% of the time there are mulitple responsible parties for the issue.

2.Facts, you must deal with facts: when a client is spewing venom at you for screwing up, missing a dead line, deleting a vital file, or taking his daughter to a rave.  you need to be clear on the facts. I personally like to develop a time line, it makes articulating the facts into an emotionaless event. It also helps to isolate the issues in questions, and the decisions that lead up to critical issue at hand.

3. Documentation: This is key, especially when there is generally a monetary settlement.  Detailed meeting minutes, and status reports, are critical for articulating the facts, it keeps the he said she said out of it.

The best advise I can give, is stay calm, don’t engage in harsh words, or even raise your voice.  If someone is screaming, frustrate and lashing out, be the punching bag, tell them your the guy to solve it, and that your going to bring ever resource to bear to the problem.

Once you’ve hung up the phone, don’t be a hero, get help.  Escalate to your management they are going to want to hear about the problem from you before they hear about it from the client.

Bring multiple heads together to get the solution.  Many people working on a problem can generally fix it faster than one person.

Keep your eye on the prize: I can’t tell you how many times that I see people trying to fix the wrong issue, or multiple issues.  Focus on the task at hand.  I had a team that was trying to fix an XML publish issue, and they decided to also fix some formatting issues.  NO! Fix the critical issue, you can always go back later to find other issues.

Prioritize: When a client comes to you with a list of issues, you need to prioritize them, determine the most critical issues, (with the client) and tackle  them first.

Communicate:  Establish a regular communication plan.  If it is impacting a production environment, you may have to give updates 2 to 3 or even 4 times a day.  In these instance you can’t communicate enough, not communicating is the fastest way to exacerbate a client.

Plan: Develop a plan of attack with your team,  It helps with the communication to the client, it shows structure and competence when you have a plan.  Even if you succeed, you can point to the action taken, and then if necessary you can move forward with a new plan.

Tim