Can’t we say “No” to a customer?
Have you ever come across a situation where you had to say “No” to your customer? Was it as comfortable as to say no to your 7 year old daughter when she is trying to climb a tree? J
For the last eight to nine years I’ve been working in different agile development teams as a QA engineer, QA lead and sometimes project coordinator where I faced very uncomfortable and embarrassing situations when it happened to say no to a customer. I know this emotion is common to most of us as we feel ‘whether it is impolite to say no’ or ‘am I supposed to say no in this moment’ or else ‘will it affect to my reputation if I say no’. At the same time I have experienced many incidences where we said yes to everything and struggling late nights to deliver the agreed features and finally ended up with huge failures. Though this is a very small fact, it does affect to our team productivity, customer satisfaction and trust. So how we can politely say no to a customer?
What if we find alternatives and give better options to customers without saying ‘no’. For example, if a customer says I want this application to be tested in chrome, IE and Firefox browsers, but we have only one QA person to do that and it’s only two more days for the release. Then we can suggest that for this particular release, we can test only the main features in all three browsers, but after that we will run a full regression test in all three browsers.
The other important thing is, when giving alternatives or options, we have to consider the time, effort and scope of the particular sprint. If the suggested feature required much time, more effort than we expected or if it change the scope of the sprint, we have to give options accordingly. Ex: If a customer wants to add a new task, then we might need to remove an available task from the list.
This type of a negotiation always helpful to avoid embarrassments and disappointments of saying no and also reduce unwanted stress of trying to deliver everything that the customer requested during the sprint.
