“Maiko, there was a client who just called up the office really angry, demanding a refund. He was really angry & rude yelling at me the whole time... What do we do?!!! I didn’t know what to say, so I just told him someone will get back to him… He wasn’t happy to hear that…”
Clearly, the person who took the call was caught off guard and was shaken up by what she had to go through.
Before going any further, let me paint a picture here.
In this particular case, the person who called angry isn’t my client. That is my client’s client. Nonetheless it is a huge deal.
Why?
Because here, we aren’t talking about a mere $195 refund. If it were, I would be saying, “Please don’t waste my time with it.” How about 100x that?
Yep, try $19,500.
What if this happens to YOU?
What would be your first reaction?
Let me guess, right about now there are hundreds of scenarios running through your mind a mile per second. Am I right?
“How do I NOT refund this guy? What are my options?”
“How much would I be able to keep?”
“What if we don’t have any choice but to give the money back?!!! We don’t have any room for this!”
If this happened 10 years ago, this kind of news would put me in a panic attack for 5 min. My heart would be racing with an immense amount of stress. Since then, I’ve handled countless non-payment and refund cases over $30K+ per pop.
So nowadays, my usual response is:
“Alright. Get me all the intel about him.”
See, ideally no business owners should get to this point without doing due diligence to consistently weed out clients from hell. At the same time, though, even with the best intention & strategy, we aren’t completely immune to this kind of incident from time to time.
Here we are. What's done is done. There’s no going back.
So, what do we do now? What would YOU do?!