The Angriest a Customer Has Ever Been at Me

You can’t go through your business life without a customer getting angry at you. The thing that defines you is how you deal with that problem. Do you fix it, ignore it, or twist it around so it’s the customer’s fault and you can wash your hands of the entire problem?

I remember an incident when I was at Robroy, and we created a problem that we needed to fix.

We had designed a water injector for the BP oil company in Mexico. The tolerance of these things is so damn close, you have to be very careful about how you quality control it. We sent a string of pipes out to the oil rig, and they discovered we had provided the wrong size corrosion barrier ring. This was a part provided by our manufacturer from the United Kingdom.

It was a $29 part, but it was holding up the entire operation. Sort of a “For the want of a nail, a kingdom was lost” situation.

If you were investing millions of dollars and a $29 part was holding you up from being able to move on, that would have a tendency to really piss you off. So the way we resolved it is I got ahold of the vendor, and I begged, pleaded, and promised whatever I could to get them to run the right size and get them on the first plane to Houston.

Now, these parts had a cure time before you could achieve the final dimension, but they worked overtime to get them made and on the flight. We picked up the order and flew them to the oil rig by helicopter.

I had a standing practice that if there was a problem, we would fix it within 24 hours. That meant, from the time I heard about it until the time they had the new parts was 24 hours.

The problem was that, in our specs to the vendor, we didn’t insist they put the part number on this particular part. So, when we received it, our QC guys inspected it, but their calipers were off, or they were having a bad day, so they didn’t measure it correctly. Plus, the parts themselves were not marked properly; the box might have been, but the parts were not.

Based on the information we had, we thought we were correct, but there were additional steps we could have taken but didn’t for any number of reasons.

I think the inspector didn’t really inspect the parts; I think he just assumed that what was on the package was what was in the package. If he had just done his actual job, we would have found the problem a lot earlier and solved it in plenty of time.

Instead, the total cost of fixing this problem included the cost of remaking the part, the airfare to Houston, and the helicopter out to the rig. I don’t remember the actual dollar amounts, but it would have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

All to replace a few $29 parts.

I fired the inspector in nanoseconds, of course, and then we made sure from that point on that every part ever produced for us or by us had the part number engraved on it.

In the end, the customer didn’t hold a grudge because we were dealing with professional engineers, and they’re not exuberant or overly emotional about anything. But they didn’t cut me off either, and I think it’s because of our policy of fixing problems within 24 hours.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now, I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Photo credit: Michael Schueller (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)