Who is to blame? You or your customers? 5 awkward situations with your customers you can avoid

As a freelancer or small business owner, you've probably worked with many customers along the way, you faced a bunch of awkward situations that's left you wondering what went wrong and who's to blame yourself or your customer. As a business owner, who's to blame is not the thing to focus on, it can be you or your customer, in some situations you may be weren't clear enough in defining your terms and project specs and in other situations, your customer may one of those types you shouldn't work with in the first time.

Although it's not your responsibility to end up with any difficulty or problem in your project, you can fix these situations and successfully deliver your work.

Below are some examples of awkward situations you may face with your customers:

1- Your customer is asking for endless modifications of your work.
If your customer is asking for minor changes that can be simply applied, it's ok to do to gain your customer satisfactions, but if your customer seems not happy with whatever you are doing then you need to be clear to your customer that this situation need to end. This situation can be easily avoided if you defined in your contract the number of modifications can apply to your work.

2- Your customer is not taking your work seriously.
If your work or the service you are providing is not taking seriously by your customer, you need to make sure to pack a respectable down payment up front and try to be as professional as you can be.

3- You customer is asking for adding new requirements during the development of your work.
Your customer may probably tell you that he blanked out about this or need to add that, well, it's not a thing to get upset about it, it's an opportunity to increase your income, simply state your client that's the requirements are out of the project scope and he requires to pay whatever amount of money to add these new stuff.

4- Your customer is not listing to your point of view.
How many times your customer insisted on something, you know it's totally wrong? It happens all the time, first you need to explain your point of view to your customer and what's wrong in what he wants, explain the outcome of the result and give him evidence to confess him. Don't do the things out of your manners cause it's your work and will represent you. You will be the one to be blame about the consequences

5- Your customer won't pay you on time.
It happens many times, your customer won't pay you your invoices at the time, you try to send emails with reminders and you heard nothing from your customer, we have a complete reference in two parts of how to deal with this situation, check this out:
Dealing with overdue invoices: tips to avoid ending up with overdue invoices (PART 1)
Dealing with overdue invoice: How to Get Your Overdue Invoices Paid (PART 2)


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