Learning Experience on giving false hope
One mistake I have made in the past and learned from is giving false hopes to make a client or people happy. However, due to the overs or underestimation, we normally end up not meeting the promises we had said we will deliver. This usually ends up making the clients angry and disappointed. This often results in losing the client’s trust or even the client themselves completely. One time while working as an intern, I was working on some projects of a client who was a regular at the company. I wanted to please him, so I told him that I will complete the project after four days. He was pleased when he heard how fast his project would be completed. However, while working on the project, I realized it was not possible to complete the work in four days. I even ended up completing the work after a weeks and this annoyed the client.
I however picked some valuable lessons from that incident, as I realized it is always good to be very conservative when estimating my time to clients. I also realized that the client will not be upset when I am clear about a particular time I was going to complete a project. But instead, they will be annoyed in the evident I promise to complete something but fail to deliver as promised. I took this lesson and became much better when it came to managing clients’ expectations of the projects I was assigned. Besides, I used this knowledge on the next project with another different client. I told them it’d take me two weeks to complete the work and I finished in one week. They were very happy about this.