What a Client Wants vs. What a Client Needs
September 3, 2008 by Duncan
Unfair Abusive Customer
The customer is always right mentality has never really sat well with me; I have worked in the customer service industry for many years and found that it is usually the unfair abusive customers who use this phrase to their advantage only to get what they want. Thankfully this doesn’t apply to your average consumer.
This kind of thinking is a “Big-box” type of customer service model that has been done to death and is so cliché. It may work in those types of industries or not I am not here to dispute that, where I know it doesn’t work is in the Web Design industry.
Here is a good example, say a first time client who owns a bookstore and who has never had a website before wanted to finally get a web presence, that’s great right? Say they also wanted a shopping cart on the site so they could sell their books online.
What they want is a website that they can tie into their already established products, services and business model making them some extra money. What they need is a basic website telling potential and existing customers about the company, what is going on, store hours and contact information.
Website Owner’s Have an Obligation
Having a website is a responsibility and if they can’t live up to a little one how are they going to be with a much larger and sophisticated one? You also have to let your clients know that just because you build them what they ask for that people aren’t just going to come and use it.
If you don’t have an existing audience or a limited number of visitors you are really going to need marketing and advertising which costs lots more money if you want to let the world know you are out there. Ideally and financially it is better to grow and adapt to achieve client expectations.
A Freelancer’s Obligation
As a professional it is your job to tell your client the truth and not to up sell them on extra services that they don’t need. Be honest and tell them that to justify having a shopping cart on a website you are going to need a certain amount of traffic to make it beneficial to them. To convert visitors into shoppers is a numbers game.
Until you get that target amount of visitors surfing the site a shopping cart is not going to be worth the extra cash to your client. You can built them what they need instead, keeping track of their web statistics and future proofing the design with the knowledge that they want a shopping cart at a later date.
So by telling the truth and not going for the up sell you can potentially get two or more websites out of them. Let them know that websites are like any other type of branded material they have and every so often they need to be redesigned, reproduced, rethought out and recreated.
It is this type of honesty that brings back repeat business and makes every potential client a lifelong customer. Which in the end is they type client you want.
