Managing Client Confidence and Client Expectations
Managing Client Confidence and Client Expectations
It's true. Sometimes it's hard to determine how clients will react to your work. For some, you can do no wrong; for others, you may feel you can do no right.
The good news is that there are ways to influence the outcome of an edit so that both parties feel like they have benefitted from the exchange. Let's examine some of these now.
Here's an important question for you to consider: Is there such a thing as a "hierarchy" of errors? Are there certain misses that are going to send a client into fits and others he or she might not care so much about?
As it turns out, the answer is yes on both counts.
A client will consider a missed error a hanging offense (or worse!) if the error is located in any of the following places:
A title or heading
An abstract, introduction, or executive overview
The first sentence of a section of text
An illustration, sidebar, or callout
The last sentence of the main text
Ironically, we editors have a habit of glossing over these areas, mostly because we're concentrating on the document as a whole! Yet, these will be the first areas the client looks over when receiving an edited document, and first impressions count. If a client finds something wrong here, he or she won't know whether to trust the rest of your work.
A client might be less concerned about errors in the following places:
An appendix
A reference
A footnote or endnote
The middle of a paragraph in a longer section of a document
What does this mean for you? Clearly, you want to work hard on all the text, so let's phrase it this way: you will want to devote the appropriate amount of time to the entire document, and you will want to devote extra time, and perhaps even a separate review pass, to those key areas listed at the top of this page. Knowing that there are places in the document the client will be less concerned with doesn't mean that you should devote less time to those sections. It means you should devote more time to the areas the client will be more concerned with.
Clients come to us with particular concerns, issues, and stressors. A researcher might be concerned about overuse of transition words; a short story author might be worried about getting the word count on a contest entry down to a certain level without sacrificing descriptive content. Both might be under deadline pressure or fed up with looking at the document because they've seen it so often. They may even be feeling insecure about their writing abilities.
It's very, very important to pay attention to special client instructions. If a client asks you to cut a 675-word document down to 500 words and you don't do that, it won't matter to the client if the document is now absolutely flawless in every other way. If a client asks the impossible (like cutting a 3,000-word document down to 2,000 words in an hour), query the client and explain what you think would be best for the document at hand. Try to deliver as much of what the client has requested as possible.
Here's an analogy: Imagine you've hired a roofing company to replace your roof. You say to the contractor, "Look, I know the whole roof needs fixing, but please make sure you pay special attention to the section over the kitchen. It's started to leak, and I'm worried it's going to cause problems with my electrical system." Now imagine that the contractor presents you with what he says is a finished job, and you see that he's put new shingles up everywhere . . . except over the kitchen. It wouldn't matter to you whether the rest of the shingles had been laid using a laser level, would it?
Now, let's say you asked the impossible. Let's say you asked the roofer to complete the job in 25 minutes. Even though you have asked for something outrageous, you still have room to complain if the roofer doesn't bother telling you that your demands may need to be altered. The same thing applies to editors and authors. If you don't notify the author of problems with a particular request, you can hardly expect the author to be thrilled when you don't provide what was requested.
It is equally important to manage a client's expectations for a revised work. Let's start with what those initial expectations might be.
An author might be insecure about work submitted for editing and secretly hope that you'll tell them the work was near perfect and an obvious bestseller. A student may hope that he or she doesn't have to spend another minute worrying about what Hamlet might have been thinking in his monologue following his discovery of Yorick's skull. Someone who speaks English as a second language might hope that you can take a barely comprehensible translation and turn it into something worthy of the journal Nature.
You will receive documents of varying degrees of quality and get about as many well-written jobs as badly written ones. So what do you do when the piece clearly needs another round of editing and revision?
The answer is to prepare them for all the red ink they're about to see. In your comments within the document, or that accompany the order overall, start by praising what they did well and compliment them on their strengths. Then go on to summarize the things they may wish to address before trying to move on with the document. If major changes or additions are required, politely suggest that when they're done with these, they return the document to you for another edit or proofread.
Keeping in mind what we said about client deadlines, they might choose to ignore your advice. Regardless of whether they take your comments to heart or cast them aside, you will have met your responsibilities, and you will be able to stand by your work.
All of us, clients and editors alike, are human. We have our good days and bad days. There are days when nothing gets us down and days when everything drives us up the wall.
As an editor, you may find yourself getting frustrated with a client in absentia. That is, when correcting a client's subject-verb agreement issues for the fifty-sixth time in the same document, you may find yourself grumbling under your breath about his or her writing ability. The client might be proposing theories that are completely preposterous or that you find you disagree with vehemently. Unless you are alert to these feelings, your frustration may come across in your comments.
Even if you're not upset with the client, comments written quickly or without pleasant modifiers may come across as brusque, condescending, patronizing, or snippy, even if you don't mean to sound that way.
This is especially true if the client at the other end is feeling insecure (first time book author) or stressed (PhD student with a serious deadline). Without the visual cues provided by your physical presence, a client may end up feeling insulted or offended. So how do you avoid this? We have four simple tricks for you.
If you're getting frustrated mid-edit, take a mini-break. Stand up, do some stretching, and maybe get a cup of tea. Get your blood flowing! Take a moment to look out the window if you have a nice view, or look at that picture of your child, grandmother, or cat that makes you feel warm and fuzzy.
When writing a comment, either in mid-edit or while making summary notes, take a moment and smile first. Actually, this is a great thing to do before any social interaction, whether it be when you enter a room to do some networking or before picking up the phone to complain about your cable bill. The act of smiling will have a positive effect on your approach and, in turn, the reactions you get.
Take a moment to actively review in your mind all the things the author has done well. This is something you'll need to do anyway when returning the document to the client, so get a head start. Depending on the state of the document, this might be quite a challenge, but there's bound to be at least one thing you can focus on, if only for a moment.
Remember that you're a professional!
Last Updated: 09/29/2022