What do you do when you’re unsatisfied with work a service provider has done for you? The answer is simple: Give the work back to the provider. When you’re paying someone to do a job, it should be done to your satisfaction. If the provider understands anything about customer service, he or she will be more than willing to work with you until you’re satisfied.
The service provider can’t read your mind, though. You have to be as clear as you can when you convey your ideas. Garbled communications are the biggest culprit on botched jobs. I once had a boss who gave me (or another artist in the department) projects with vague descriptions, such as, “Make it look official.”
Okay; official from whose perspective? That boss would often ask for revisions, irritated that none of us could give him what he wanted. Sometimes he’d accuse the artists of wasting time doing one thing when he claimed to have clearly wanted another. This type of attitude builds up resentment on both sides. If the boss had sat down to better define the project he had in mind, there would have been no revisions required.
Some of the best clients that I have worked with have made the effort to organize every aspect of their project. They had their copy, they found the photos or images they wanted to include, and they had some idea of what the result of their project should look like. I listened carefully to their suggestions, and they listened to mine. We worked as a team. If I needed to do revisions, I did them happily.
All right – maybe not “happily”. There are times when revisions are like the husband moving furniture for his wife. “Oh, honey, I think the sofa would look better over there… Um…No, maybe over there…Put it back where it was”. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth, smile, and move the sofa back and forth a few times until it’s just right.
When the client walks away from a finished project feeling satisfied and well treated, you can say you did the job well. A happy customer is one of life’s greatest rewards. If you’re that satisfied customer, that feeling tells you that you’ve found a valuable and reliable resource you can return to time and again.
