Client Transitions and Competition

I was responsible for client transitions at my company. The double edged sword for a larger business is that in situations, that would otherwise carry significant emotions by someone closer to it, a healthy objectivity about the client relationship.

Our two big rules for this are
1) help the client transition as quickly and efficiently as possible
2) don’t cause an outage.

I see all sorts of versions. Some clients are incredibly peaceful and non-dramatic. Some clients are incredibly noisy, dramatic, and frustrating. Also true for other providers. For all the good and easy transitions, there is at least one in the bunch with unreasonable expectations.

-3 months ago I had a provider say there was something in the environment that we should have told them about while what they were complaining about was completely out of scope of our contract with the client.
-2 months ago I had another provider convinced that we need to go on-site and deploy tools for them as part of our offboard because they had no engineer in the market.
-1 month ago I had a provider who didn’t understand how to setup MFA despite us sending them all the information (including secret key). 5 emails explaining the situation with screenshots and KB links they complained that we hadn’t given them any help.

There are also providers that have been a pleasure to work with.
-Many have only needed our agent deployed and a date of turndown to work.
-One sent us a script they found that helped us export specific piece of data they needed that would have taken us hours to click through all the screens, saving us a bunch of time.
-One did have a negative experience initially and sent me an email “offline” from the client to explain their experience. I cannot describe how grateful I am for that. Incredibly professional.

Here’s the thing, if someone is good at their job then they understand that not all transitions are bad. 90% of the time, my understanding is the client just made a business decision. Totally fine. Even with that truth everyone has to understand that
1) everyone has their own processes and your outside experience only informs your experience and not the other providers intentions
2) the incumbent is not responsible for the incoming provider’s onboarding activities
3) We are all vendors and there is literally no value in having a vendor fight in front of a client. NO. VALUE. EVER.

What’s the point of this? There’s an observable increase in posts about competitors needing to help each other because it’s the right thing for the industry and accusing providers of being difficult in transitions. The other right thing for the industry, is to not have expectations that other providers will do your job and then creating drama in front of a client because you don’t like that their process isn’t yours.

Entirely removing friction in a process like this isn’t possible, but it is possible to avoid throwing another provider under a bus in front of client.

Let’s all do better.