Managing Challenging Clients: Building Effective Relationships with Difficult Customers

Do you need to deliver an effective service to challenging and, at times, unreasonable internal or externa clients? Do you worry that you'll lose business, or suffer damage to your reputation, if you don't handle a particular customer well enough? Do you need to improve the quality of your relationships with your clients in order to secure more repeat and long-term business or to avoid your function being out-sourced? Perhaps you want to know how to handle ambivalent and oppositional client personalities. Perhaps you want to become more skilful at handling customers who appear, at times, obstructive to the work they have asked you to do. Or perhaps you simply want to understand how to work more effectively with clients who are, in the main, troublesome and challenging from your first contact with them onwards. If so, this book is for you. Managing Challenging Clients takes you through a highly practical, personal and insightful process. It will introduce you to a valuable set of tools which will enable you to assess how you go about building, maintaining and managing your client-facing relationships. The book will help you to improve the level of influence you achieve with awkward and challenging clients whether they work for your organization or another employer. Managing Challenging Clients will help you to: * Understand how to create and maintain influential, value-added relationships with the most difficult of customers. * Recognise where your responsibilities to your clients begin and end. * Identify the risks some clients perceive that they face when they place their trust and reputation in your hands. * Understand the importance of the interconnected issues of trust, control and involvement to the quality of dialogue you establish with your customers. * Extend the range of influencing options available to you when working with your most controlling, manipulative or unreasonable clients. * Assess at what point to cease working with a particularly challenging client. * Get the best chance of delivering a service which is perceived as value-added even when handling an unreasonable situation and a provoking character.

Table of Contents:
Handling Challenging Client Behaviour: It's Your Responsibility Reputational Risk: Your Client's Dilemma Controlling Clients: Involvement, Trust and Control Maintaining the Balance: Clients Who Take Advantage Trouble with Responsibility and Commitment: Customers Who Say One Thing and Do Another When Enough Is Enough: Ceasing to Work with Troublesome Clients References and Recommended Reading