The client was never a technical problem. It was a trust problem that had disguised itself as a technical one.
When I took over the mandate, the first thing I got was a warning. This client’s CIO was a hothead, he would tear you apart, everyone was glad to be rid of him. Watch out for him. The technology actually ran, but the client escalated non-stop anyway.
That was exactly the case. The technology ran. The relationship was poisoned. The client was treated like the feared neighborhood dog, for which you are forever looking for a piece of meat to keep it calm. He did not feel taken seriously and demanded, at times forcefully, what he was entitled to: professional service, which he was willing to pay for. That is not a difficult client. That is a client to whom the wrong thing was owed.
Reliability instead of discounts
I won the trust back not with discounts but with reliability. That sounds banal and is the hardest thing in daily practice. Three things brought the turning point.
First, honest planning. We agreed a four-hour maintenance window, even when we jointly hoped to be done in two. And we reported back the moment it was running again. The opposite is the usual reflex: promise the shortest possible windows because no one wants the discussion, and then fail to hold them. Second, honest problem reporting. We once had to roll back to an earlier system state because a fault had surfaced that could have hurt the client too. You say that, instead of sitting it out and hoping for the best. Third, communication as such, in normal operation as in escalation: what is happening, what are we doing, how long do we estimate. Regularly, openly, even when the news is uncomfortable.
After three months it was quiet. It took a full year to the clean handover into regular operation, and in the months in between the relationship normalized completely. In the end the client switched providers, for financial reasons, and said goodbye almost apologetically: this has nothing to do with you, we simply decided differently. A client who had been announced as a choleric threat ended up politely exercising his good right to freedom of contract.
When a client escalates „technically“ although the technology runs, the fire is almost always somewhere else: at a promise that was broken too often.
The real fire was never in the technology. It was in trust, and trust is not put out with discounts but with promises kept.
