A client recently asked us to publish seven or eight articles on their WordPress website. I said yes straight away. Send them over, we will get them live. It is a five-minute job.
It was not a five-minute job.
A promise made before the inputs arrived
I committed before I had seen a single article. My reasoning felt sound at the time: publishing an article on WordPress is about as routine as web work gets. Paste the text, add a heading, press publish. What could be complicated?
The first thing to arrive was a PDF. Anyone who has tried to move content from a PDF into WordPress knows what happens next. You copy, you paste, and the formatting falls apart. So began the back-and-forth. Sorry, a PDF will not work; could you send the Word documents instead? No problem, came the reply.
The Word documents
A zip file of Word documents arrived, and with it the same problem in a different form. Each document ran to roughly three or four pages, full of numbered lists, bullets, indentations and cascading styles. Underneath, the structure was all over the place. Some text used the Normal style, some used paragraph styles, and in places a Heading 2 came before the Heading 1 it was supposed to sit beneath. These were very poorly formatted documents, and they caught us off guard.
What the work actually involved
Getting clean, consistent pages meant treating each document with care. We cleaned the documents manually, using Claude along the way, while being careful not to make any drastic changes to the client’s content. From there we generated clean HTML that could be pasted into WordPress without dragging the Word formatting along with it.
Then came the details. Images had to be cropped out by hand and inserted individually. Embedded links had broken when the content was converted to HTML, so each one had to be found and corrected.
The task of uploading seven or eight documents became a project of nearly two working days.
Two perspectives, one gap
Meanwhile, the client’s view was entirely reasonable from where they stood. They had sent us seven or eight documents, and a week later the articles were still not live. They had no idea how much formatting and structure can change the effort involved in publishing content to a website.
To be fair, neither did my team. We had promised, so we kept going.
Lesson one: never commit before you have seen the inputs
I knew this already. Most people in our line of work do. But knowing something and learning it are different things, and this week I learned it properly. A request can sound simple and still hide real complexity in the material behind it. A few minutes spent opening the files before saying yes would have let us set honest expectations about format, effort and timing from the start.
Lesson two: should this work be charged for?
This one I have not resolved. Two days of effort, or even one, is real time and real cost. Should a client pay for work that neither side anticipated? I am not convinced a client would readily accept a charge for what they understood to be a quick upload, particularly when we had already agreed to it without caveats. That is exactly why the question needs answering before the work begins, not afterwards. If content preparation is a separate piece of work, the time to say so is when the request comes in.
What customer excellence really means
Stepping back from all the pondering, the message is simple. Customer excellence does not mean jumping the gun and saying yes before you have seen what you are being given.
I had to apoligise to the client and I am sure, client must be wondering why such a simple task would take a week to complete. So leasson learnt:
Enthusiasm is good; an informed yes is better.
Even the simplest requests can lead you down a rabbit hole, and the best service we can offer is to look before we leap, set clear expectations, and then deliver exactly what we promised.
