3 Tips for Dealing With Difficult Construction Clients

As a general contractor or owner of a small construction company, you’ve likely faced your share of difficult customers and clients. A difficult client can make your job harder and can even lead to a loss of revenue by spreading negative sentiments about your company to their friends and family.

That’s why developing strategies to prevent clients from becoming difficult in the first place is crucial to the success of your small business. Once you understand how to deal with difficult customers, you’ll see an increase in referrals, better word of mouth, and improved customer satisfaction.

We talked to Aaron Dumas [1], a construction professional with over 20 years of experience to get his advice about how small construction companies can keep clients happy.

Tip #1: Take time to listen and understand where your client is coming from

To address a client’s concerns, you have to understand what those concerns are and how they got frustrated to begin with. That comes from being willing to sit and listen. Your first instinct when hearing a client complain about a timeline or the project budget might be to get defensive.

In Dumas’s experience, getting defensive often turns frustrated clients into difficult ones.

“You need to understand where they’re coming from,” says Dumas. “Are they nice people who you’ve turned mean by failing to meet expectations? Oftentimes, we’ve turned reasonable people who would never be considered difficult into difficult clients by not listening to their concerns.”

He advises construction companies to use empathy as their first tool when dealing with difficult clients.

“Tell them you appreciate the fact that they trusted you with this project,” he says. “Empathize with the fact that it’s a lot of money they’re spending. Let them know that the project’s success is important to you.” 

At the end of the day, your clients want to feel like their project is your priority and will be finished successfully. Reassuring them that you’re taking their concerns seriously will often prevent clients from going from frustrated to difficult.

Tip #2: Use better communication in order to keep clients happy 

As a construction company owner, you have to wear a lot of different hats.

Before you owned your company, you likely weren’t the point of contact with clients. You might not have ever had to deal with communicating with several clients all at once who have projects in different stages. All of these clients bring their own expectations to the project and each will want different levels of communication throughout the project.

Set communication expectations early on in the project. Dumas cites failure to communicate properly as one of the major reasons that a client becomes difficult.

If you’re doing a good job communicating every step of the way, you’re less likely to have failed expectations because your client understands where the project is and how much longer it will take. They’ll feel more involved and connected which will prevent those frustrations from becoming anger. 

Tip #3: Focus on customer experience from start to finish

Communication and empathy are key factors when it comes to dealing with difficult clients, but, according to Dumas, the most important thing you can focus on to deal with difficult clients is to put a large emphasis on customer experience.

Dumas and his team put a priority on customer service.

Your clients can tell when you view their job as transactional. Of course, your goal should be to make money, but if you take a little bit of extra time to be personable and ask your clients about their lives, you might be surprised by their willingness to be more reasonable if complications do come up.

Take a minute to ask them a few questions about their lives. Why do they want to do this project in the first place? Is it going to be so they can host more parties for their friends and family? Is there a specific event they’re excited about? If you know they’re going to be hosting their grandchild’s first birthday party in a few months, you can bring that up during updates.

It might not come naturally to be so personable, but it can lead to more satisfied clients. And satisfied clients tell their neighbors and friends about what an amazing job you did. That leads to easier contracts down the line.

Use software to help with customer relationships and communication

If you’re improving how you communicate and track project progress, you might find that the manual methods you were using before aren’t as effective. That’s where software comes in to help automate and track some of these processes to make your job easier and your clients happier.

It doesn’t do you any good to ask personal questions about your clients if you never bring it up again or you forget who told you what. That’s where construction project management software comes in. Aside from project tracking, scheduling, and document management capabilities, construction PM software often comes with note-taking capabilities where you can record all of your client’s preferences so that you never forget to bring them up.

Once you find out how your client wants to be contacted and at what time, set up a reminder in your scheduler to ping you about the meeting so that you never forget.

Dumas views the software his company uses as invaluable to the success of each project. “The software we use has calendars with a note section where, at the beginning of every project, we write in the customer’s expectations on communication,” he says. “We record the time frame we’ve given to them as well as any specific requests a client might have so that we never forget. The software also gives reminders of when to give clients updates.”

Difficult construction clients are preventable with the right care and planning

While not every single difficult client can be addressed by being more empathetic, improving communication, or boosting your customer service, a large portion of them can. It might take some practice and the right software to make everything feel more natural.

If you’re successful, you’ll see a high return on your time invested by increasing the number of positive referrals you receive, and you’ll reduce the number of negative reviews you get on review sites which can hurt your ability to find new jobs.