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This book is written for complaint handlers but is dedicated to complainers.
Without complainers, we’d have no need for complaint handlers.
Without complainers, companies wouldn’t know what to fix.
And without complaints, organizations wouldn’t have the chance to draw dissatisfied customers into tighter relationships.
So, thank you, complainers.
Keep on complaining directly to complaint handlers.
Your complaints are gifts.
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Preface
Today’s customers are in the driver’s seat. The amount of information and technology they have at their disposal enables them to easily switch from one virtual retailer to another, one local supplier to a different online global supplier, one service provider to another possibly operating in the same neighborhood. And they can let thousands know online exactly what happened if they don’t like the way they were treated by the retailer, supplier, or service provider.
Furthermore, they don’t have to tell you why they switched to another company when they are dissatisfied. The good news is that if customers tell just one person in your company or post a complaint online, they are providing a direct pathway for you to use to keep them. It will also give you a way to gain information that could help you improve your business. And that is a gift.
What are complaints? They are customer statements about expectations that have not been met. In this book, you will find this definition used multiple times, sometimes in slightly different ways, but it always describes dissatisfied customers. Dissatisfaction varies from customer to customer, making it difficult to have one solution to create satisfied customers who arrived with a complaint.
Some of these complaints are tiny (“Your desk clerk was unfriendly”) while others are asked as questions (“Why aren’t you open in the evenings?”). Some are very personal (“I didn’t like how this steak tasted” or “I didn’t like how the server smiled at me”). Others are about speed (“I didn’t get my package on time”). Many are about
price (“I know I can get this cheaper at one of the big-box stores or from a different supplier”). Regardless of size or significance, every complaint is a gift. And all these myriad types of complaints need to be handled with respect, intelligence, friendliness, transparency, speed, empathy, and concern. That’s not always easy.
One of the most potent realities about complaints is customers will accept many mistakes—as long as service representatives handle their complaints positively. Fix the problem, for sure, but do it with emotional intelligence, and you will likely get customers who come back and sing your praises. Fix the problem without any human connection, and you may lose customers permanently or at least not get full cooperation from them. This requires a mindset that pivots on whether you and your entire team think about complaints as gifts.
This means your customer service representatives (CSRs) need to know how to accept complaints as gifts. They have hundreds of ways to do this. Victoria Holtz and I have coauthored A Complaint Is a Gift Workbook, which is jam-packed with 101 activities in a blendedlearning format. The workbook can be used individually, taught by your training team, or facilitated by your managers. Your CSRs will unquestionably improve at handling complaints if they go through these activities.
Communication about dissatisfaction is one of the most critical exchanges between customers and your organization. This contact offers a chance to take ideas from the marketplace and implement them. With it, we have an opportunity to fix problems that customers have discovered. It also signals whether or not they get the goods and services they were promised on time and that their feelings matter and must be taken into account.
Whether you can actually give the customers what they want is important, but often that is unrealistic or impossible. In fact, you’ll see that how you handle your customers’ complaints can be as important
as solving their problems. When handled well, customers will walk away feeling heard and taken care of and therefore are likely to stay with you. In addition, emotionally satisfied customers will doubtlessly recommend you to others.
Complaints—and feedback—are gifts. This mindset, and how to deliver it, is what this book is all about.
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Complaints—A Pathway to Keep Customers
Customers will always find reasons to be dissatisfied. It’s the nature of business—and life. If customers leave angry or disappointed without saying anything, you’ve missed the pathway to fixing something that doesn’t work, that satisfies them, and that keeps them with you. Lost customers hurt your bottom line, your morale, and your reputation. Lost customers help your competitors.
In 2020, the National Customer Rage Study reported over twothirds of households experienced a product or service failure in the previous year and complained. When complaining, 58 percent got nothing or limited satisfaction due to their efforts, while 65 percent left filled with rage and frustration.1
Customers Speak and Hopefully We’ll Listen
In 2018, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) told the world that 32 percent of customers walk away from brands—not just brands they know
but also brands they love. When you think about how much marketing money, effort, and time it takes to create brand loyalty, this reality should encourage organizations to analyze why their efforts to keep customers close after a service or product failure aren’t working better. All it takes, according to PwC, is just two or three negative experiences for American customers to abandon a brand, and this is for 59 percent of people who love their brands.2
What constitutes a bad complaint-handling experience in business? Sometimes it’s as simple as poor follow-up. Lack of follow-up affects trust, and trust affects customer loyalty. In 2021, the fascinating Edelman Trust Barometer stated that business is the most trusted global institution. This ranking creates a responsibility: the consuming public expects businesses to lead with trust. For example, food and beverage businesses, a vast and varied sector, show gaps in trust that can be “repaired,” according to Edelman, by doing some of the steps you will see recommended in this book.3
Edelman’s advice includes taking a hard look at where you stand with your customers and operations, empowering people at every step, leading with facts, and acting with empathy. Is this approach important and relevant to complaint handling? No doubt, because food and beverage businesses that are trusted outperform their competitors.4
Complex as it is, trust helps to deepen relationships with customers; this means dependability—that is, keeping promises.
What are the intangibles of honesty and trust in business? For customers, they include the organization admitting its mistakes and accepting the consequences. Owning up to mistakes isn’t a big deal; after all, customers accept that firms make errors. Many of them are in business themselves, and they know about making mistakes. When complaints are discussed honestly, businesses create trust and reinforce already strong brands. Customers want to hear, “That was our fault. We are sorry.” Trust can exist and grow on the foundation of this discourse. When a business accepts responsibility for its mistakes, it
breeds trustworthiness. In today’s economy, a company achieves most of its value in intangibles, trust being a significant one.5 Marketing specialists keep driving this point. When customers stop believing a brand will do what it promises, loyalty drops.
The A Complaint Is a Gift Mindset
Mindsets influence how both employees and consumers behave. The mindset we will focus on in this book is that complaints are fundamentally gifts. Well-handled complaints are a mechanism that can help organizations build agility (responding quickly to problems that need to be fixed), trust (acknowledging when a mistake has been made), and empathy (showing care for their customers).
It is time for all organizations to treat complaint handling as an important strategic tool generating information about their products or services they can learn from. Rather than a nuisance, an outlay, or dealing with someone who wants something for nothing, complaints need to be seen as a marketing asset.
Customer complaints provide one of the primary and most direct means to communicate with customers outside of sales. After all, how many consumers pick up the phone to chat with you if they have no problems? Customers practically have to be bribed to fill out survey forms. But when a problem occurs, chances are slightly better that they will talk directly with you. That’s when people in organizations need the right mindset to effectively react as if they have received a gift.
If companies get better at complaint management and handling and begin to see complaints as gifts, it will open a more competitive line of communication with customers. The goal of this book is to show you how a strategic shift in your view of customer complaints can be a significant step to improving your service and operations and keeping your customers.
Hopefully, this message is crystal clear. Complaints can help drive the direction of your customer interactions. Every management book on service and quality echoes Peter Drucker’s original 1951 caution: “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”6 Drucker’s warning is all too often forgotten. Many companies have their “We live for our customers” talk down to a fine art but believe issuing staff orders is all they need to do. Many executives don’t get that telling employees to behave a certain way is not enough. “We already told them that,” they lament, as if telling people to change will ever be enough. Employees and the systems they are forced to operate in stop empowerment and persistently get in the way of customers having a positive complaint resolution. If businesses are genuinely interested in developing a customer-centric culture, heightening customer care, and providing outstanding customer service, then how customers are treated when they complain is core. And this means creating an environment where customer service representatives (CSRs) can thrive.
The Reality about Today’s Complaining Customers
In 2017, RightNow Technologies reported in its Customer Impact Report that good service is still a huge differentiator for customers making decisions about where to make purchases. The report also shows the growing number of people who say they won’t return to an organization after a single bad experience.7 Compound that with today’s customers experiencing more problems than in previous years because products have become increasingly complex, and it’s easy for something to go wrong.
According to the latest 2020 National Customer Rage Study, companies are losing more customers than keeping them once they complain because of ineffective customer care, an increase of 10 percentage points compared to its 2017 study. As they report, “[Organizations] are doing all the right things, but they aren’t executing well. Further, the
upgraded investment in corporate complaint-handling departments has evidently NOT kept up with customers’ expectations.”8 They have failed to encourage a foundational company-wide complaints-are-gifts mindset. As a result, they end up using corporate complaint-handling guidelines as an almost scripted way to bring customers back to the point of satisfaction. That doesn’t work for the most part.
Senior managers had to be cajoled to invest resources into complaint-handling programs prior to when customer centricity was considered an important business concept. Significant sums of money have been invested to improve service recovery, but the recent Customer Rage studies teach us that these investments haven’t had much impact. In short, complaint-handling programs heated things up but didn’t do much to create satisfied customers. Business leaders believed mandating complaint-handling training and teaching scripted responses would be sufficient. They failed to see that mindsets first had to be changed, such as adopting the mindset that complaints first and foremost need to be seen as gifts.
The good news is all those investments in complaint-handling programs do not need to be tossed and substituted with another flavor of the month. Depending on the size of your organization, you may need to upgrade some of your computer applications. Regardless of how you track your complaints, people inside your organization need to know what’s going on with customer dissatisfaction. They need to learn how best to respond, stand up to complaints without becoming overwhelmed, and then use these opportunities to deepen customer relationships. They need to know the company holds this position too. Suppose complaint handling is seen only as a list of dos and don’ts. In that case, you probably won’t see increased levels of intangible value as your customer-facing employees interact with complaining customers.
This book will attempt to address why businesses and their customer-facing staff struggle to accept this basic premise and behave accordingly. If we use complaint handling as the powerful tool it can be, we have to make major shifts in behaviors, attitudes, and mindsets.
The good news is gaps are so large that opportunities exist for almost all organizations to make dramatic improvements in handling complaints. This includes taking responsibility for fixing what customers face so they leave satisfied and feel they can trust the organization. Without accepting responsibility for customer satisfaction when customers complain and why higher percentages of customers leave, organizations end up with lower levels of trust. Neither is productive for customer retention.
Five Myths of Complaint Handling
Gallup, in its various polls, concludes that 62 percent of customers aren’t fully engaged with brands because brand promises aren’t consistently delivered.9 I have observed many businesses buy into what I call the “Five Myths of Complaint Handling” without fully supporting improved delivery of their brand promises—the source of many complaints. These myths contribute to covering up the reality of what needs to change to improve complaint handling.
Because complaint handling is frequently unpleasant, many corporate leaders buy into the following five myths. This way, people don’t have to confront the fact that complaint handling is complicated and isn’t going to improve unless people fully grasp that a complaint is a gift. Certainly more than five myths exist, but the five listed below capture this book’s message. If we can learn how to live with the reality of the challenges of complaint handling, everyone in our organizations will get better at handling the gifts we receive.
Myth #1: People Naturally Know How to Handle Complaints
The first complaint handling myth is that people naturally know how to handle complaints. After all, they’ve been receiving negative feedback their entire lives.
The reality is most people have to check their natural reactions when receiving feedback or complaints. When we perceive we are being attacked, most of us are inclined to attack back or walk away wounded, especially if the complaint is delivered in a blaming manner. Effective complaint handling requires that we counter our instinctive tendencies and see that complaints provide information that can help us. Customers are giving us a chance to meet their needs. This approach starts with the Gift Formula, beginning with a strong “thank you” upon hearing a complaint. This creates a natural communication chain to work civilly with dissatisfied customers.
Myth #2: Companies Should Set Targets to Reduce the Number of Complaints
The second myth is that companies should set targets to reduce the number of complaints.
The reality is employees would then act by not reporting the bad news they hear. They will conclude the organization doesn’t want to listen to the bad news in a complaint, so setting targets to reduce complaints only encourages staff to make sure even less customer feedback is received and reported. Some organizations I have spoken with admit that they even pay bonuses for a reduction in complaints. One manager told me after his company started paying rewards for complaint reductions, they began seeing increases in product failures that were no longer being reported. He said they paid a massive price for this “reduction in complaints.” Staff not only stopped reporting what they heard but they also made it difficult for customers to complain. Complaint handlers can do this a dozen ways, and when this happens, the customer no doubt walks away with increased dissatisfaction, whatever the company’s mindset about complaints.
Most organizations want to eliminate complaints or at least reduce them. Yet complaints are one of the most direct and effective ways for customers to tell businesses about ways for improvements. As
stated, if in a competitive market economy these improvements do not occur, a sizeable percentage of customers will likely take their business elsewhere.
Myth #3: If We Give Customers What They Want, We Have Satisfied Them
The third complaint-handling myth is if we give customers what they want, we have satisfied them.
The reality is giving customers what they want when they complain does not guarantee satisfaction. Complaints involve a huge emotional component. We can give customers what they want tangibly, and they may still walk away upset if their emotions are not addressed. Good responders use dozens of psychological approaches and techniques to create satisfied customers after they’ve complained.
Myth #4: Complaint Handling and Sales Are Unrelated
The fourth complaint-handling myth is that complaint handling and sales are unrelated.
The reality is sales and complaints are related in multiple ways. Complaint handling is as demanding a task as sales. Good complaint handlers are, in effect, salespeople for your organization because they keep your customers coming back. Salespeople need to know how to handle objections, and at one level, that is what a complaint is. Complaint handlers create intangible follow-up value for the organization. And upselling becomes fairly easy once a complaint has been handled.
Myth #5: Complaints Are a Sign the Company Is Not Doing a Quality Job
The final complaint-handling myth is complaints are a sign the company is not doing a quality job.
The reality is companies will always create some dissatisfaction for customers. If you learn anything from this book, it will be that zero defects is not a realistic target. Our quality suffers when we fail to hear dissatisfaction because then we have nothing to change to get better at what we do. Complaints represent an open dialogue with our customers who give us a chance to keep their business. They provide us the information we might otherwise not hear that we can then use to improve our quality. At a minimum, complaining customers are talking with us rather than the rest of the world. And that is a gift!
Who This Book Is For
This book first speaks to those who deal directly with customers and those with managerial responsibility to retain customers. Customer service managers, sales managers, and quality managers will also find this information helpful to ensure they reinforce this topic that frequently is only minimally covered in customer-service programs. Trainers and consultants who conduct those programs will find this material to be an added resource. This powerful topic can also be included in leadership programs. Speakers will find an accumulation of material not readily available in one source as it is in this book.
The ideas in this book also relate to your personal family relationships. People who know and love each other also have disagreements. And they don’t like a lot of the accompanying feedback. In business, they are called complaints, but they show up in our personal lives as well, perhaps as whining and bickering. If you get better at handling customer complaints, you can adopt the same mindset for your personal life—or vice versa.
How This Book Is Organized
A Complaint Is a Gift is divided into eleven chapters. Chapter 1 takes an in-depth look at what a complaint really is. Chapter 2 looks at how
we tell customers not to complain. Chapter 3 explores five solid reasons why complaints are gifts. Yes, most people ultimately come to see the value in looking at complaints as gifts, but when the complaining customer is standing in front of them, those complaints can look like anything but a gift. This is where mindset and organizational support come into play.
Chapter 4 focuses on how to handle the complaints you do receive. You’ll find a Gift Formula that helps keep your language, interactions, and actions consistent with the belief that a complaint is a gift. I have replaced the eight-step Gift Formula from the previous two editions of A Complaint Is a Gift with a more easily remembered three-step formula. Everything is still there, but you will not only be better at responding to complaints with a shortened step-by-step approach, you will also more likely use the entire formula when dealing with complaints. You will also learn how to use the Gift Formula in chapter 5 to its maximum strength—the Gift Formula on steroids.
Chapter 6 considers hidden complaints and word of mouth (WOM). How to effectively interact with upset and aggressive customers is covered in an expanded chapter 7. In today’s world, angry customers are not uncommon! Listening to angry customers when they have a complaint is one of the best ways to find out what customers want. Chapter 8 offers techniques to develop mental fortitude so CSRs aren’t devastated by how some complaints are delivered. This way CSRs can handle their challenging and essential jobs, especially as they deal with aggressive customers.
In chapters 9 and 10, you’ll see what an organization can do about complaints on the internet. These chapters are primarily written for business leaders who want as much customer feedback as they can get their hands on. However, it’s not a bad idea for all employees to acquaint themselves with what is being said about their companies. Businesses are not entirely defenseless to complaints posted online. Forty years ago, complaining online was just beginning to be used by upset customers. It wasn’t until 1995 that large numbers of people
even began to use the internet. In the last ten years, what used to be a whisper can now quickly become a global rant, and the remnants of the complaint can last forever. The research about online complaints is potentially a game changer, enabling us to confidently answer questions I am regularly asked. In chapter 11, we’ll look at how the A Complaint Is a Gift philosophy can be used in your personal life. Yes, complaints at home can be gifts as well. The conclusion looks at next steps for individuals, leaders, and companies.
Each chapter includes a list of core messages that summarize the main points. You’ll also find a set of discussion prompts about complaints at the end of each chapter. These prompts can be used at staff meetings to stimulate discussion and understanding of customer complaints or as part of ongoing training efforts to improve complaint handling.
Several of the topics listed above were addressed in the first two editions of A Complaint Is a Gift in 1996 and 2008. This edition has been updated with new examples and new research in an almost entirely rewritten third edition.
Examples Used and Research Cited in This Book
All examples used in the book really did happen. A few examples are repeats from the first and second editions of A Complaint Is a Gift. Some of them were so good I couldn’t resist the impulse to include them in this third edition. I’ve tried to make a new and different point on the few repeated stories and research that I cite.
If some details are wrong in the examples, I apologize in advance. When the experience was negative, I removed the company name unless the company no longer exists or the complaint is part of the public record. These decisions were carefully made because every company messes up from time to time. It is tempting to conclude a company provides poor service or offers inferior products by hearing just one example. In fact, some customers will leave a business never
to return because of one slipup reported by a customer they don’t know and have no reason to trust. That’s the danger of word of mouth.
Finally, this book contains a lot of summarized research data. You will quickly learn the literature varies little on the subject of complaints. All the research points in the same direction: dissatisfied customers generally do not complain. When they do, their feedback is all too often poorly handled and inadequately managed. Since some of the cited research in this book is more than a few years old, I have already received feedback along the lines of “Why don’t you use current research?” Some of the research I cite from the 1970s or 1980s has become a data point that is no longer being questioned and has since been accepted as solid and no longer needing replication. Hundreds of academic researchers and business bloggers keep repeating the same original research, accepting it as a truism. And perhaps it’s not, but it’s what is available.
Many academic researchers and students completing their doctoral dissertations work on narrow topics related to complaint handling and do not address whether the original research on which they base their work is still valid.
I have looked long and hard for updated research, for example, about the percentage of customers who complain to someone who can actually do something about the complaint. That’s a big question, and I have found no comparable current studies to earlier surveys. Some attempts have been made, but the research is wrapped in seriously constrained conditions, making it difficult to draw general conclusions. You can email me with any questions (or complaints) you have about dated research, and maybe by then I will have uncovered just the piece of research we are both looking for.
What Exactly Are Complaints?
Complaints are gifts that customers give businesses. Because they are gifts, complaint handlers need to carefully open these packages to see what is inside. The first step is to feel gratitude that customers have complained in the first place since so few of them do. Otherwise, businesses would never hear about how they fail their customers and have a chance to repair the damage. But first what are complaints? As this book title proclaims, complaints are gifts. Let me include a word of caution here. How you define complaints will shape how you react when receiving them, so let’s use the most straightforward description of this complex customer activity. Complaints are statements about expectations not met.
Complaints Are Complex Opportunities
More than a few factors make handling complaints complex—even tricky. One factor is few people have the mental fortitude to deal with people issues all day long—regardless of how customers complain.
Without fortitude and resilience, complaint handlers run the risk of burnout. And burnout leads to a lack of empathy toward the people they are trying to help. We’ll cover this topic in depth in chapter 8.
Adding another dimension of complexity, CSRs are located throughout different departments in organizations. Some complaint handlers are called service technicians, others are called service reps. And each department has its own ideas about effective complaint handling or service assistance. Big computer companies think of their call-center employees as computer technicians, but the bottom line is they still handle complaints. Other complaint handlers include retail service staff, health-care workers, product-exchange staff, administrative staff, and sales staff. Rarely do complaint handlers only handle complaints.
Perhaps we should start calling complaint handlers “problem solvers” since that’s largely what they do. This would also stop CSRs from thinking that what they do all day long is interact with complaining customers. The Merriam-Webster thesaurus has more than fifty synonyms in English for the word complainer, and none of them are compliments. It includes whiner, fussbudget, fusser, grumbler, kvetch, bellyacher, squawker, crab, crank, faultfinder, nagger, nitpicker, and objector. I noticed it does not describe a complainer as a “gift giver.” Maybe we need to change that.
Another huge contributing factor to complaint complexity is that most customers don’t complain when facing a problem. Dozens of studies reinforce this fact, and there are multiple reasons why this is so. Researchers say a “feeling nothing will happen” is the most common reason customers don’t complain.1 Another common reason cited by customers is they are afraid something negative will happen due to their complaining. But customers have hundreds more reasons why they don’t complain—at least to anyone who can do something about their issue. They tell people standing in line, family, friends, and anybody else who will listen. They’ll even tell strangers while riding in a bus.
Perhaps the most important factor about why complaints are complex is they are also opportunities for CSRs to emotionally reconnect with customers when they have a service or product breakdown. Solving a problem is one thing, doing it with empathy is another. CSRs who fix customer problems can upsell, perhaps even more easily than salespeople. They are seen as problem solvers rather than salespeople who just want to sell. As a result, complaint handlers play a number of roles, none of which are particularly easy, such as sales, complaint handling, public relations, marketing, and customer retention.
Top Line Messages versus Embedded Threats
Many complaints are presented at a surface level but underneath could be looming threats from customers to leave your business. That’s a complex opportunity. Let’s look at some examples:
• At first glance, the home buyer is complaining about multiple delays they have endured after being promised their home would be ready for their daughter’s wedding. Fundamentally, they are so disappointed they are considering doing anything to get out of their contract.
• At first glance, customers may complain a newly purchased dark blue towel frayed or the color ran and ruined a load of clothing. Fundamentally, customers are giving the company an opportunity to respond so they might continue buying more goods from it.
• At first glance, a customer may complain they waited on hold for three and a half hours to get help setting up their expensive new computer. Fundamentally, they fear they made a stupid purchasing decision, a lingering fear that will periodically rear its head over the course of all the years they need technical help.
• At first glance, customers let their insurance agents know in no uncertain terms when they call the insurance company to
handle a simple question and their calls are not returned for days. Fundamentally, they are warning their agents they will check out a competitor when their policy comes up for renewal.
• At first glance, health-care patients may complain the medical advice they were given made their situation worse. And the doctor providing a second opinion agreed. Fundamentally, the patients wonder whether they aren’t due compensation for their loss of time, pain and suffering, and expenses.
What do you suppose most CSRs hear—the first glance complaint or the fundamental message? Unfortunately, all too many hear only the top-line message. When organizations listen to customers with open minds, empathy, and flexibility, they can see the fundamental message the customer is attempting to express.
Complaints have direct “at first glance” messages in them. They also have emotional reactions and messages embedded inside the complaint story, rarely explicitly stated, except perhaps by showing irritation. My own experience is that complaints that are grounded in concrete reasons (“These pants got ripped,” “The seams weren’t strong enough”) are listened to with greater respect by CSRs than complaints that are expressed in highly emotional terms (“It was the worst moment of my life when the seams on these pants split open,” “I was horrified by how everyone saw it. I’ll never forget what happened”). I contend all complaints have an emotional component—even if hidden—and they are all legitimate (unless, or course, the customer is committing fraud).
Customers Want Their Emotions Recognized
Complaint handlers need to accept that emotions are always present when someone complains. Period. It’s tempting to put emphasis solely on solving the customer’s issue when first hearing a complaint. In that case, customers remain frustrated or may not listen to a proposed solution, even if it’s a good one. Likely, the CSR also gets frustrated and
thinks, “Gosh darn it, can’t they see I have offered them a solution!” Now both are emotional, which only exacerbates the situation.
Research studies over the years have concluded that customers don’t just want their problems solved.2 Of course, they want some type of solution, but they don’t necessarily expect their needs to be completely met. In other words, they don’t demand perfection for them to stick with you. Satisfaction with how their complaints are handled is worth more than replacing a broken object, offering a discount, or refunding the amount paid for the purchase. Even though customers won’t necessarily acknowledge this, satisfaction has as much to do with how their emotions are recognized and handled during the process.
Errors are a given. But dissatisfied customers are definitely not. Multiple studies cited in this book underscore an essential point: complaint handling has to do with taking care of customers’ problems. But how complaints are emotionally handled has a great deal to do with keeping customers loyal.
A business owner friend experienced a great example of this a few years ago when taking care of one of his customer’s problems, which strengthened that client relationship. The customer, who represented millions of dollars in sales—a way too high percentage of my friend’s total sales—called while he was at a trade show in Las Vegas. A quality problem with one of his products potentially would shut down his client’s entire production line in Mexico, costing thousands of dollars daily. The owner was told he needed to be at the plant in Nogales, Mexico, the next day by ten in the morning, never mind the logistics of getting to a destination in Mexico some five hundred miles away. He rented a car, drove to Phoenix, slept overnight, and then drove early the next morning to Tucson, where he lived. He picked up his own car to drive across the Mexican border. On time at ten o’clock that morning, he met with his client’s team, who then laid out the problem.
It turns out the issue was a simple communication matter that took about ten minutes to clear up. The owner said the head of purchasing,
