Managing Perceptions
Sometimes it's difficult to know which way to turn when a clients perception makes you look bad
Here’s a radical thing – a company admitting that it got something wrong!
We recently simplified a clients email systems, by reducing the numbers of the accounts, and reducing the complexity of the configuration – technically sound, but we mishandled the clients expectations of how this would effect the business, and how the users would handle the change.
Hands up and ‘Mea Culpa’ 
In this case I misread the clients level of understanding of the systems that we had changed and didn’t convey what the client would need to do to facilitate the change once the technical bit was complete.
A simple error, but one which had consequences.
Today I went to the client to make sure that what they expected, and what were doing, were on the same page – singing from the same hymn-book to coin a phrase.
As it turns out, this was exactly what the client wanted – us to hold up our hands, admit we’d dropped the proverbial ball. Once this was out of the way and I cleaned up the crumbs from the large portion of humble pie, we got down to the process of fixing the ‘issues’.
There were no technical issues – what there was was some explaining of what we’d done, and some minor training to re-program the client to use the it.
I left with an order for a little more kit, and an additional service to be installed and configured a little later on.
I suppose the moral is simple – don’t assume that because it’s ‘simple’ that your client understands what you are doing. 
Lesson learned…
Here endeth the sermon – thanks be to God… 
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