COVID did something useful to our client relationships. It told us the truth about them. The clients who trusted us before the pandemic gave us more room during it. The clients who'd always been a little uncertain about us got more controlling. Same crisis. Different responses. The difference was the relationship that existed before the crisis arrived.
What You Need to Know
- Crisis amplifies the existing quality of a client relationship, it doesn't create a new one
- Trust-based relationships survived remote delivery with minimal friction
- Transactional relationships required more reporting, more calls, more reassurance
- The lesson isn't about COVID. It's about the investment you make in relationships before you need them.
Two Clients, Same Crisis
I'll anonymise the details, but the pattern is real.
Client A has been with us for two years. We've been through a failed deployment, a scope renegotiation, and a team member change. Each time, we were transparent about what went wrong, what we were doing about it, and what it cost them. The relationship was built on honest communication, including the uncomfortable kind.
When COVID hit and we went remote, Client A's response was: "We trust you. Keep delivering. Let us know if anything changes." Our reporting cadence stayed the same. Our delivery continued. The remote transition was a non-event for the relationship.
Client B started with us three months before lockdown. We hadn't been through anything difficult together. The relationship was professional and cordial but untested. The engagement was largely transactional: deliverables for dollars.
When COVID hit, Client B wanted daily status updates. They asked for detailed timesheets. They questioned whether remote work would affect quality. They asked to sit in on internal sprint ceremonies. None of this was unreasonable. It was the rational response of someone who doesn't yet have evidence that they can trust us under pressure.
83%
of B2B buyers say trust is a top factor in vendor relationships during crisis
Source: Edelman Trust Barometer, Special Report: Brand Trust and COVID-19, 2020
What Trust Looks Like in Practice
Trust isn't a feeling. It's a set of behaviours. With Client A, trust looks like this:
They give us space to solve problems. When a deployment issue arose, they didn't prescribe the fix. They said "what's your recommendation?" and then gave us room to implement it. That space is valuable. It lets us bring our expertise to bear instead of executing instructions.
They share context we don't ask for. Client A tells us about internal politics, budget pressures, and strategic shifts that affect the project. This context makes us better partners because we can anticipate changes instead of reacting to them.
They tolerate uncertainty. When we say "we think this will take three weeks but there's a risk it could take four," they hear the honesty. They don't demand a guarantee. They plan for the range.
How Trust Gets Built
Looking back at Client A's journey, the trust wasn't built in good times. It was built in bad times.
The failed deployment was the turning point. We could have minimised it, blamed a third-party integration, presented a sanitised version of events. Instead, we walked them through exactly what went wrong, including the parts that were our fault. We presented a remediation plan with a timeline. We hit the timeline.
Trust isn't built by never making mistakes. A client who's seen you recover well from a problem trusts you more than a client who's never seen you challenged.
Isaac Rolfe
Managing Director
That single episode, handled honestly, created more trust than twelve months of on-time delivery. Because on-time delivery tells the client you're competent. Honest failure recovery tells them you're trustworthy. Those aren't the same thing.
The Investment Equation
Here's what COVID made clear: investing in relationship depth before a crisis is exponentially cheaper than trying to build trust during one.
The time we spent with Client A being transparent about a failed deployment saved us weeks of overhead during COVID. The daily reports and ceremony attendance that Client B required added roughly five hours per week of overhead. Over six months, that's over 120 hours of work that produced no deliverable value.
Those hours weren't wasted. They were the cost of building trust that should have existed before the crisis. The lesson is to invest that time upfront, during normal operations, so that when pressure arrives, the relationship is strong enough to absorb it.
What We're Changing
We're changing how we start new client relationships. Not just professionally. Deliberately.
Early honesty. In the first month, we find something to be transparent about. Not manufactured. There's always something. A scope risk, a technical uncertainty, a timeline concern. We raise it early and handle it visibly. The client gets to see us deal with difficulty before difficulty arrives at scale.
Context sharing. We proactively share our constraints. "Our senior developer is at 80% capacity this sprint" is information that builds trust. It signals that we're being honest about our delivery capability, not just saying yes to everything.
Regular relationship check-ins. Separate from project updates. "How are we doing as partners? What could we do better? Is there anything you're not telling us?" These conversations feel awkward. They produce the information that keeps relationships healthy.
The pandemic will end. The lesson won't. Build relationships that can survive a crisis, and the non-crisis periods will run better too.