Clients; a business wouldnt be in business without them. We love them but they often drive us mad. Once again we are digging into our archives for those of you who may have missed certain articles or not been a visitor to Technibble at the time. In this blast from the past we’ll show you some of our most popular articles about clients.

• Increasing Client Loyalty – This is one of the best tips I have learnt in my 4 years of computer repair and it is probably the most simple and effective one.
• How to Handle Customers – There will come a time when you will face satisfied customers, confused customers but above all, angry customers. This is an article written out of experience for technicians who either have trouble with, or will be facing these customers. This article is about how to handle customers, not how to handle PC problems.
• Sexual Favors on the Job – (Ok, this one isnt an article about with dealing with clients… but it DOES involve clients. I’ll throw it in for giggles). Ok, now I have your attention. Recently on Craigslist someone posted an ad advertising that they will fix computers in exchange for sexual favors. Here is a screenshot of the Craigslist ad.
• Communicating with Clients: Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear! – ‘Write an article about how techies can make themselves appear more human’, says the brief for my debutante freelance article for Technibble. AS IF! is my first reaction. That nugget has been floating about since I was at University, where they made us carry out a special course on communication – which was fine. After all, we only had to communicate with each other, and everyone in my class was fluent in stunted geekobabble anyway!
• Customer satisfaction…because they’re always right! – The customer’s always right. Even if you work in a technical area where the customer is actually (pardon me customers) CLUELESS! They are still right. Know why? Because if they don’t like what you do, they take their business elsewhere. So even if they weren’t technically correct, they’re still right, because they’re buying, or not, if you fall foul of one!
• Questioning Customers – Getting the Right Type of Answers – When a client calls you up for some tech support, you are obviously going to have to go though some questions to try and figure out what is happening with their computer based on their responses and find a fix. Once you have the details you need, figuring out the fix is often the easy part. The hard part is getting the rights answers out of your clients without annoying or insulting them. In this article we’ll talk about getting the right type of answers out of clients.
• Giving Away too Much Information and Dealing with Time Wasters – The phone rings and on the other end is a potential customer willing to purchase a computer from you. They tell you that they want to do some music downloading, DVD burning and some video editing. You are eager to impress and tell them that they would need a DVD burner, a powerful video card and lots of RAM and HDD space for the video editing. You give them a ballpark range of how much such a computer will cost and they say thankyou and tell you that they will get back to you.
• Want Loyalty? Get to know your Clients! – One of the great advantages of being a self employed computer tech is that you can choose your own hours to work. Two months ago, I did just that and went traveling around the world with my girlfriend for two months. Before I left I changed my answering machine and voicemail messages saying that I am traveling, will be back on X date and would love to help them with their problems when I return. When I got back… I found out just how loyal my clients are to me.
• Getting Sued – When things go wrong in business, one of the sentences you can expect from a customer is “im going to sue you”. I have personally been threatened once before in the past which you can read about in one of our previous articles titled making business mistakes. It is generally what a customer says when they have run out of other options and most of the time they are just blowing off steam. However, some do follow through and actually do sue you.