Things are certainly different in the UK to the US!
I’m glad to say that in any company I have worked, this behaviour would have seen the practice manager removed from the clients’ company (if they were not the business owner) or the client would be removed from the client list.
In fact, I have dropped clients for less.
I was once building a new eCommerce site using an off the shelf solution for a client and together we had thoroughly scoped out the project. I had asked about what payments they wished to accept and specifically asked, do you need to support AMEX (the payment gateway they wanted to use did not support it for GBP at the time so I was asking to see if they would like to switch). They said no and didn’t want to support AMEX and to proceed with the gateway supplied.
During the project, the client started working with an ‘angel investor’ who wanted to see the completed project which the client must have sent links over to the development site.
My first interaction with this investor was receiving an email from them saying: “Pissed off with this” with regards to the lack of AMEX support and essentially ranting about how much time effort and money had been invested (it was probably one of the lowest budget eCommerce sites I have ever worked on).
He then preceded to blame me for issues caused by the inventory/stock control not being set up correctly (something the client had wished to do themselves and had refused my offer to show them how to use it for free). This was a new experience for me, usually clients who are tight on budget are also the ones who want everything for free!
As you can imagine, I did not appreciate the tone and so I emailed back, explained I had explicitly been told AMEX support was not necessary and stated how I had offered free training on the stock management side of things which was refused.
I finished the project to the original spec and invoiced them. I told the client I did not appreciate the behaviour of the investor and how that is not a good way to do business.
I then received an email a month later asking me if I had availability for some additions/updates to their site and I refused.
The moral of the story is, as much as you should try and calm a situation, sometimes people need to learn they cannot just get whatever they want by being rude or aggressive.
