Not all customers are worth keeping. Learn the top 3 customer red flags of untrustworthy clients—and why letting them go is the best option.
How many times have you spoken to your spouse about trust? Honestly, I can’t recall ever talking about trust with my wife. Double-check with her if you like, but trust has been given in our 20-year+ relationship.
Speaking for myself, I would be pretty alarmed if she suddenly started to talk to me about trust.
Change of scene. As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, I get to meet way more new people than in my private life. If you want to sell your product, you need to speak to everybody interested in your product — whether this is at a tradeshow, at a networking reception, or when somebody randomly calls you.
Some of those people you talk about your product with eventually become partners or customers. And that’s where trust matters. I have written about trust in partnerships in a previous article; now let’s talk about trust in customer relationships.
To make one thing clear: Most of our partners and customers are great to work with. But as always, there are outliers to whatever is deemed normal, and that’s what this article is about.
Let’s look at some warning signs that there might be a trust problem in a customer relationship.
1. “Can I Record This Call?”
During RFPs, it’s quite normal that product demos held over Zoom or Microsoft Teams are recorded. That makes sense, as prospects might want to cross-check your written RFP answers with your product demo or share the product demo with some of their colleagues who couldn’t participate in the product demo.
However, once a prospect becomes a customer, it’s not needed to record every project update call. It is enough to keep meeting minutes of project update calls.
One of our customers recorded every single call with us. Interestingly enough, this customer’s project manager treated our team badly, shouting at them and threatening them. When the matter escalated and and we asked for the call recordings, suddenly the call recordings were no longer available. A clear red flag that this customer cannot be trusted.
2. Terrorizing Team Members
Most digitization projects are change management projects, and it’s no different for Yonder when we implement our content management solution. This means that unfortunately, project hiccups are normal. When they happen, most customers acknowledge that the root causes for the hiccups could be on either side, and they focus on getting the issues resolved together with our team.
But yes, there are exceptions. I remember being terrorized via WhatsApp by a customer’s project manager over weeks in a tone that was beyond acceptable, for a problem that could eventually be attributed to Boeing (everybody who knows me will confirm that I’m not easily terrorized).
The guy recording all the calls terrorized our team, too, insulting them in emails and being rude to them in front of a large group of people.
Terrorizing supplier’s team members is yet another red flag that a customer cannot be trusted.
3. Falsifying RFP Answers
If you read this far and you think I’m exaggerating or we’ve arrived at the culmination point, read on. We’re not quite there yet.
We had a case where a customer falsified our RFP answers after going live, as he missed a feature we transparently said we didn’t offer during the RFP. Instead, the customer chose to blame us for things we never said we could fulfill.
How low can you go? That’s the lowest I have seen in my entire career serving customers. It speaks volumes for both the person who did that and the organizational culture of that customer.
Who Wins?
Now you might ask, did the good guys win over the bad guys in the end?
It doesn’t matter.
Customers fuel every business, and no business easily lets customers go. But your competition deserves a select few customers of yours.
