10 things your employees really should not do when visiting a client

Prompted by this post by HR Capitalist  I came up with this list of what employees should avoid in the interests of good client relations.

1. Arrive to seal a shower with no sealant.
2. Call to collect cash for cleaning windows with no ability to give change.
3. As a computer guy engaged to help install new software telling the customer that their new computer purchase was a bad one.
4. Be late for an agreed appointment time ( when the booker was told that the client has to be somewhere else later and although tight it is possible to be around while the work is done) – and then say that they need to go to a retail park out of town to get supplies.
5. Say -after they started the job – that there can be no guarantees for how long it will last.
6. Swear -under any circumstances.
7. Smoke cigarettes( or any other substance for that matter!?) when working on the premises.
8. Ask for a cup of tea/coffee ( 4 sugars…) 10 minutes after arriving – and at regular intervals thereafter.
9. Spin a story about why work can’t be done -the way it was previously agreed- which is full of holes.
10. Damage work just completed by another tradesman when installing theirs.

Of course these all happened to me. There must be more. Making up this list has amused me no end. 

On a similar theme I arrived home last week to find a card posted through the door saying that the lawn treatment company had called but had not been able to get access to my garden because the gate was locked. They would call to arrange another time.

Now this was a problem – I had not booked any lawn treatment. There was no number to call on the card so I had to look them up, call a central number and ask what was going on. The phone adviser said that she would get someone to call me. The guy who called said that indeed I had not booked them and they should have gone to a house in the next street. I asked what I would have come back to had my gate not been locked and he said that they were there to scarify the lawn. Imagine what it would have been like to come back to find my lawn had been ravaged as the start of some major programme of work over the spring which I had not commissioned! I have to agree it could do with some care and attention – but I’ll decide when and by whom.