Tough customers come in many guises and are labeled with a variety of names by builders: difficult customer, high-maintenance customer, the squeaky wheel, and customer from hell to list just a few of the more polite terms. These folks take up a disproportionate amount of company time, emotional energy, money, and attitude. The scars such buyers leave on an organization’s psyche can be deep and permanent if you do not take steps to mitigate the damage they cause.
Delays. Consider for instance that other “regular” clients suffer delays in attention while you attend to the demands of the difficult buyer. The screaming phone call or tense meeting keeps you tied up for nearly an hour. When the tirade is over, you need to decompress with a cup of coffee (or a shot of Jack Daniels).
Then you need to tell three other people about the threats, insults, and condemnations you listened to. Next comes the “Where did we go wrong?” analysis. This often leads to discussions of how paperwork, procedures, or personnel need to be changed. Meanwhile, nice Mr. Jones is waiting for an answer to a reasonable question about construction of his home, a price on a change order, or for a work order to be issued to a needed trade contractor for warranty work.
Resources Drained. The time and money that might have gone to improving performance or providing thoughtful extras for all of your buyers has been taken up by the “me first, me only” behavior of the difficult buyer.
We all recall days in elementary school when some wise guy in the back row threw spitballs at the teacher. And as a result, the entire class missed recess. Now that wise guy is buying a home, and the rest of the customers are missing recess. The money for the new buyer thank-you gifts got used up consulting with your attorney. Or the training budget had to be reduced, so the superintendent won’t be attending that course on scheduling.
Harsh Policies. This daily grinding would be bad enough, but it gets worse. Policies and procedures are strongly influenced by naughty buyers. Most, if not all, harsh and unfriendly sounding builder “rules” stem from some negative event with a previous buyer. Some companies have so much defensive paperwork that it almost seems as if their clients are being punished for buying a new home. At the least, bad impressions are made on new buyers.
For example, after a buyer interferes with work on the jobsite, a builder is likely to establish a “no site visits without an appointment” policy. Of course we all know this is unenforceable, not to mention it makes some buyers wonder what you are hiding.
Buyers’ unreasonable expectations for materials cause builders to create multiple versions of disclaimers about such realities as “wood takes stain differently” and “concrete will crack,” even going to the extreme of stating that “no warranty whatsoever exists on concrete flatwork—don’t even ask.” That builder documentation has increased in amount (and decreased in friendliness) proportionately to problems caused by a few unrealistic or unreasonable buyers cannot be denied.
