I will be sharing my fresh learning/thought in this particular article. Will write more articles on my past learning as and when time permits. This article can be more interesting for mates who are from consulting background or who want to be into consultancy.
In my 5 years of experience of consultancy, I have always heard "Client is never tough. Its the time lines/deadlines that makes the client tough. {Specially in forensic domain where all the results are needed ASAP}". But this time, story was totally different. I was out of city for some engagement of a very large ticket client and had a meeting with the internal audit head. I and my Manager were well prepared with the deliverable and were prepared in the best possible manner because of the nature of the project and because of the nature of the client :p
We had a meeting with the client and it was like we were playing the dragon round :p Questions one after the other were coming like bullets and we were trying that we are not hit.What ever questions were asked we replied to it like "We will do it"----over commitment and that was what killed us. That day meeting went off well.
Next day was worst. We had a conference call for about 2 hours with the client and with our chief... "we call our bosses as chiefs...sounds good :D". Whatever answers we replied to the client in a previous meeting, they came back to us like a boomerang and hit our a**es very hard. The worst part was that the chiefs were also there on the call. Else it would have been easier for us to tackle the situation.
Call happened....went off very well and we decided that in future we are not going to
1) Say "We will do it in this particular time frame". Always say "We believe we can do this in a given time frame"....Believe me mates, each and every word you speak up to the client should be filtered out so that there is no problem in future.
2) Whenever a consultant interact with "C" people of a firm/ or a big shot of the firm, make sure you consult with your seniors all the points before going for a meeting and specially when the client is too tough to handle.
After the call was completed, all the issues were resolved and the process was streamlined. Client didnt said anything till date. So I can say "No news is a good news :)".
I am happy in a way that I am getting exposure to handle these kinda clients as it enriches the experience. Simply executing the projects with soft clients didn't give any spark.
Will keep posted if some more learning comes up {which I think will surely come up} by this client. I will be out of town sooner for a day or so for this particular assignment and I am sure this time there will be no other issues coming across....InshaAllah :)
Success be ours,
Kush
