The whole team called the client difficult. I treated their complexity as a signal, not a problem, and turned them into a reference.
The internal story when I arrived was that the client was difficult. Complex processes, demanding teams, and a change-management workflow that kept throwing priority-0 and priority-1 incidents. 'Difficult' was the word everyone used, and it had quietly made the team defensive and reactive.
I started by changing how we talked about them. Their complexity wasn't a problem to manage, it was a signal about how their business actually worked. I sat with their quality-management leads, not to push back on the workflows generating incidents but to understand the need underneath them. What we'd been logging as edge cases was their main operating cycle.
From those conversations I pulled twelve specific features that addressed the real incident drivers, sequenced them by incident reduction per unit of engineering effort so the first few delivered most of the relief, and kept the client alongside me the whole way. Resolution time fell by a third, and the relationship changed shape entirely: from an escalation source to a co-design partner, then to a reference for new business.
'Difficult' usually means the team has stopped being curious about why a customer behaves the way they do. The most demanding customers are often handing you a free roadmap.