When you're in business you have to be geared up for the fact that there will be customers who will have issues with various services and products that you offer. Customer support and responding to customer complaints is part and parcel of any company. While quality controls ensure that your deliverables are up to the mark, sometimes clients can still have reservations about what you have given them.
Especially in the consulting line of business, where we're delivering skills, opinions, and knowledge, it often becomes subjective whether we are meeting with client expectations or not. Managing customer expectations is one of the biggest challenges of being in this line of work. In a number of cases, the end result of the engagement is a report or a set of documents and presentations. And very often during the course of the engagement the client often voices their differences of opinion and displeasure at some of the deliverables.
With one of our clients, I almost got into an argument over some points related to the consulting services we were providing. I do strongly recommend to my team to avoid arguments at all costs, unless it is an absolutely critical issue. Disagreements should be voiced, but spats should be avoided. Coming back to this particular case, eventually the client was pleased enough to give us the following testimonial, and it is events like these that make consulting completely worthwhile...
“KK and his team did a brilliant job in guiding us towards the 27001 certification. Their approach was very methodical and systematic right from the stage of gathering requirements in the initial stages to the documentation work and then trainings and audit readiness stages. In fact what I liked the most about their approach was that he focussed on transferring his knowledge to us which has enabled us to sustain the improvements even without his involvement. They never restricted themselves to the scope of the contract. They were willing to that extra mile to make sure that it added business value to us."