Customer Service Nightmare: Dealing With Small OEMs

[Ivan Seeking]

I just got a call from this guy who whines and whines and whines. He is a small oem that I did a job for about seven years ago. Back then he had bought twenty-year old equipment [industrial controllers] from an HP sale and then expected it to work like the new technology. Of course this only hurts him in the end because in this business you either pay for it in hardware, programming, or other integration needs, but there are no free rides. But, being that he had his entire life's savings riding on this venture, I personally ate a good bit of time because I was trying to help him out. But does he appreciate a minute of it? Of course not!

He just took a power surge that damaged some equipment. Now he has the nerve to complain that he can't download the program without the required proprietary software, and he has decided that this is my fault. :rofl::rofl::rofl: The fact that he couldn't afford to buy the software back then seems to elude him. I finally just told him that if all of my customers were like him, I'd be out of business. I've told him before that he got the work for half of what it should have cost but he always seems to forget that part.

One of the lessons that I've learned over the years is that the little guys are often more of a pain in the butt than they're worth. They will try to nickel and dime you to death no matter how much you have tried to help them.

 

[Evo]

Oh definitely. The best thing one of my old bosses taught me was when to walk away from a sale. He'd tell me "if this guy is giving you this much grief before he signs the contract, just think of what you'll have to deal with later".

Recently my company sent letters to chronic complainers stating "after a thorough review of your records, it appears that there is nothing we can do to make you happy, so we have zeroed out the amount you owe us and we'll even waive your termination penalties, you have 30 days to find the company of your choice before we cut your service off.

I got so many calls from clients applauding us for killing off the deadbeats.

 

[Moonbear]

Ivan, does that customer call you about the same time every year? I swear I've heard this story before.

Recently my company sent letters to chronic complainers stating "after a thorough review of your records, it appears that there is nothing we can do to make you happy, so we have zeroed out the amount you owe us and we'll even waive your termination penalties, you have 30 days to find the company of your choice before we cut your service off.

:rofl: Wow, that takes some moxy! But, it makes sense. After a while, the time and effort to please someone costs more than just dropping them as a client.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Oh definitely. The best thing one of my old bosses taught me was when to walk away from a sale. He'd tell me "if this guy is giving you this much grief before he signs the contract, just think of what you'll have to deal with later".

Recently my company sent letters to chronic complainers stating "after a thorough review of your records, it appears that there is nothing we can do to make you happy, so we have zeroed out the amount you owe us and we'll even waive your termination penalties, you have 30 days to find the company of your choice before we cut your service off.

I got so many calls from clients applauding us for killing off the deadbeats.

Yep, I've heard about what your company is doing and I think it's great! I saw some of the complaint histories that motivated this move, and the bottom line is that some people are impossible to please. When I saw your story reported, it was also reported that some retail stores are banning customers based on their returned items rate.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Ivan, does that customer call you about the same time every year? I swear I've heard this story before.

Heh, I might have posted something similar the last time he called to whine...

 

[wolram]

My company is different, we have hero bosses who go out and buy second hand plant cheap, 9 times out of 10 it ends up at the farm or the holding scrap yard, just in case there is some part worth salvaging (there never is), and now they are quibbling at the amount of overtime we work,

 

[FredGarvin]

Recently my company sent letters to chronic complainers stating "after a thorough review of your records, it appears that there is nothing we can do to make you happy, so we have zeroed out the amount you owe us and we'll even waive your termination penalties, you have 30 days to find the company of your choice before we cut your service off.

That is awesome. I can't believe someone finally had the guts to do that in this day and age. Bravo.

Ivan, I bet the guy that keeps bugging you also expects free technical assistance every time he can't get something to work right?

 

[BobG]

I just got a call from this guy who whines and whines and whines. He is a small oem that I did a job for about seven years ago. Back then he had bought twenty-year old equipment [industrial controllers] from an HP sale and then expected it to work like the new technology. Of course this only hurts him in the end because in this business you either pay for it in hardware, programming, or other integration needs, but there are no free rides. But, being that he had his entire life's savings riding on this venture, I personally ate a good bit of time because I was trying to help him out. But does he appreciate a minute of it? Of course not!

He just took a power surge that damaged some equipment. Now he has the nerve to complain that he can't download the program without the required proprietary software, and he has decided that this is my fault. :rofl::rofl::rofl: The fact that he couldn't afford to buy the software back then seems to elude him. I finally just told him that if all of my customers were like him, I'd be out of business. I've told him before that he got the work for half of what it should have cost but he always seems to forget that part.

One of the lessons that I've learned over the years is that the little guys are often more of a pain in the butt than they're worth. They will try to nickel and dime you to death no matter how much you have tried to help them.

I learned about cheap customers when I was in high school.

I took care of our front lawn because I had to - plus, once you start to get into it and start to see some of the effort pay off it was kind of fulfilling. We had a nice looking lawn.

Nice enough that when people saw me mowing the front lawn they'd ask if I was interested in mowing their lawn. They'd pay me $3 - $5 dollars for around 30 - 60 minutes worth of mowing and then complain because their lawn still looked nothing like our lawn. There's a heck of a lot more to making a lawn look nice than just mowing it. (Enough work that I really wasn't interested in taking on entire landscaping jobs for other people although a couple twins I knew went that route. Their business grew so fast they wound up having to hire a lawyer to do their contracts before they'd even graduated high school.)

 

[turbo]

Years back, I had a client (large trucking company) for which I had written custom accounting software and custom state fuel tax programs to track pro-rated fuel tax refunds in states that do that kind of thing, and I started getting trouble calls from the head bookkeeper telling me that my programs were crashing. I'd make the run down to their place and try to troubleshoot the problem only to find that everything was working well. Finally, after visiting every couple of days or so over the next couple of weeks (the frantic phone calls were getting pretty tedious), I happened to be in the office when lights dimmed briefly, and the bookkeeper said "There! It crashed again!" I contacted the power company, and they sent out a guy to hook up a data-logger on the meter. The next day, he came out again and identified a number of large voltage drops that had happened the previous day. The heavy-equipment shop across the street was on the same transformer as the trucking office, and they had installed some new equipment that had pretty heavy current draws when in use. The power company installed a new separate transformer that afternoon, and miraculously, my programs stopped crashing. That company had been a pretty good client, but as soon as problems cropped up, they blamed them on my programming (which had operated flawlessly for months) and held my feet to the fire. Since they were a prime reference and I had gotten lots of other work based on their recommendations, I couldn't just leave them hanging, but they sure knocked a big hole in my productivity for a few weeks.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

That is awesome. I can't believe someone finally had the guts to do that in this day and age. Bravo.

Ivan, I bet the guy that keeps bugging you also expects free technical assistance every time he can't get something to work right?

It gets better than that. He tries to use old buddies to do the work, and then they call me asking for free help.

The only reason that it has gone on this long is that he and his wife are very nice people. As people they are absolutely wonderful. As customers, they could be the death of a company like mine.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Years back, I had a client (large trucking company) for which I had written custom accounting software and custom state fuel tax programs to track pro-rated fuel tax refunds in states that do that kind of thing, and I started getting trouble calls from the head bookkeeper telling me that my programs were crashing. I'd make the run down to their place and try to troubleshoot the problem only to find that everything was working well. Finally, after visiting every couple of days or so over the next couple of weeks (the frantic phone calls were getting pretty tedious), I happened to be in the office when lights dimmed briefly, and the bookkeeper said "There! It crashed again!" I contacted the power company, and they sent out a guy to hook up a data-logger on the meter. The next day, he came out again and identified a number of large voltage drops that had happened the previous day. The heavy-equipment shop across the street was on the same transformer as the trucking office, and they had installed some new equipment that had pretty heavy current draws when in use. The power company installed a new separate transformer that afternoon, and miraculously, my programs stopped crashing. That company had been a pretty good client, but as soon as problems cropped up, they blamed them on my programming (which had operated flawlessly for months) and held my feet to the fire. Since they were a prime reference and I had gotten lots of other work based on their recommendations, I couldn't just leave them hanging, but they sure knocked a big hole in my productivity for a few weeks.

This is common in my world as well. Whenever there is a problem, the first thing people blame is the black box. They overlook little issues like the inside of a 480 volt control cabinet being pressure washed!

 

[turbo]

This is common in my world as well. Whenever there is a problem, the first thing people blame is the black box. They overlook little issues like the inside of a 480 volt control cabinet being pressure washed!

Yep! "Little issues" indeed. When I was selling dryer felts (woven synthetic fabrics that support the running sheet of paper around huge steam-filled steel cylinders for drying) I got a call from a paper machine superintendent saying that one of my company's felts was causing an entire dryer section to shake and vibrate, causing sheet breaks. I knew that was bogus, but headed right over since they were going into a shut-down and I didn't want them to cut off a $30,000 fabric for no reason. I looked the dryer section all over and couldn't find anything out off the ordinary, and the head of maintenance showed me printouts of their vibrational analysis that "proved" that the felt was causing the vibration. I convinced the superintendent to start up that one section of the paper machine, and sure enough, the whole dryer section shuddered every time the seam of the felt got to the guide roll on the top of the section. I pointed out to the maintenance manager that since the guide roll was supported by air-bags, it was the most poorly-coupled roll in the whole section, but he was still convinced by his printouts. I walked around to the back of the dryer section and started listening to the machinery, using my flashlight as a stethoscope, and sure enough, there was heavy clunking accompanying the shuddering. I told the operator to shut down the section immediately, got the superintendent and the maintenance manager together and asked if the bull gears in that dryer section were helical-cut or straight. the maintenance manager said they were helical, and I nodded and told him that the retaining nut on the primary bull gear had come loose and that as the speed controller tried to slow or speed up the dyer section, that big bull gear was sliding back and forth axially on its shaft, being driven by the smaller gears that it was meshed with. They opened the inspection covers and found that that indeed was the case. It cost them a couple of days of extra production while they got a new bull gear in and replaced other damaged gears, but that was far cheaper than the huge smash-up that would have occurred eventually.

Now, anybody who is an engineer should have known that a fabric weighing several hundred hundred pounds running over and around rolls and steam drums in the sheet-flow-direction does not have the capability to couple to a huge iron-framed machine section weighing many hundreds of tons and shake it violently from side to side in the axial direction. They believed a coincidental timing turned up by their vibration-analysis equipment and tossed common sense out the window. I can't tell you how many times paper-mill staff with poor trouble-shooting skills wasted my time like that.

 

[DaveC426913]

It gets better than that. He tries to use old buddies to do the work, and then they call me asking for free help.

The only reason that it has gone on this long is that he and his wife are very nice people. As people they are absolutely wonderful. As customers, they could be the death of a company like mine.

Yep. The small guys can nickel & dime you. It doesn't help that you know that, if you don't, they might go under. And it really doesn't help when they're likeable.

I had a software app that the boss' friend had his life savings resting on. But the scope of what we knew he needed was way larger than his grasp. And the project would come back and haunt us every time he needed to put it in front of another potential investor.

 

[K.J.Healey]

I used to feel bad working in private tech support for individuals that had no computer skills at all.
This one guy (75yr old man) wanted me to back up some of his files and reformat his computer for him. So I came over, backed up everything I saw that was important. Asked him if there were any pictures, documents or anything hidden that he might need. He showed me one directory and I grabbed it. I had him go through TWICE to let me know what he wanted backed up before I formatted. I thought I had everything.

After the formatting is complete, everything reinstalled, he installs some email program that came with the system (never seen it before) and says "What happened to all the emails from my grandchildren?"

Talk about a torn heart between feeling bad for losing a guys memories and anger from being put in a position when all he had to do was say "oh yeah, there's this program that stores my old emails for me".

At least he tried to hook me up with his attractive neighbor :)

 

[ShawnD]

Now, anybody who is an engineer should have known that a fabric weighing several hundred pounds running over and around rolls and steam drums in the sheet-flow-direction does not have the capability to couple to a huge iron-framed machine section weighing many hundreds of tons and shake it violently from side to side in the axial direction.

Sounds a lot like "the wind pushed my car into the ditch", ignoring the fact that they were driving 60mph on an icy road.

 

[turbo]

Sounds a lot like "the wind pushed my car into the ditch", ignoring the fact that they were driving 60mph on an icy road.

At the very least, they were stretching cause and effect to its limit, looking for a scapegoat for what was obviously a serious mechanical problem. To abuse your car analogy, their "analysis" was on a par with observing that their engine threw a rod at the exact same time they turned their windshield wipers on, and their response was "Darn wiper blades! Gotta get new ones!"

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The saga continues: After doinking around with Jim-bob's machine design for two months, he came back with a still failed unit and many more thousands of dollars out of pocket. So now the situation is desperate and he dumps the whole thing on me. Unfortunately, I've had his system here for testing and it turned out that all of the hardware [controls, servo's, etc] was damaged by the power hit.

So I have this guy constantly reminding me that his entire financial future rests on this system. He has been having chest pains - already been to the ER once - and now he's out of money [this includes his retirement money] and inventory and is losing orders. But I think we about have him ready to go again. Today he is getting the servos and at that point he should be ready to rock and roll. But here's the worst part of all: Now that I have a better understanding of his business I have come to realize that he is absolutely insane. He is making nickel and dime widgets for a very limited market - nuts! [He will have to sell about 170,000 widgets just to pay my bill!] It is about the saddest situation I've ever encountered in manufacturing and I don't have the heart to just walk away...and I've never worked with anyone who is so helpless. He is absolutely incapable of understanding any of what's going on.

 

[david90]

The saga continues: After doinking around with Jim-bob's machine design for two months, he came back with a still failed unit and many more thousands of dollars out of pocket. So now the situation is desperate and he dumps the whole thing on me. Unfortunately, I've had his system here for testing and it turned out that all of the hardware [controls, servo's, etc] was damaged by the power hit.

So I have this guy constantly reminding me that his entire financial future rests on this system. He has been having chest pains - already been to the ER once - and now he's out of money [this includes his retirement money] and inventory and is losing orders. But I think we about have him ready to go again. Today he is getting the servos and at that point he should be ready to rock and roll. But here's the worst part of all: Now that I have a better understanding of his business I have come to realize that he is absolutely insane. He is making nickel and dime widgets for a very limited market - nuts! [He will have to sell about 170,000 widgets just to pay my bill!] It is about the saddest situation I've ever encountered in manufacturing and I don't have the heart to just walk away...and I've never worked with anyone who is so helpless. He is absolutely incapable of understanding any of what's going on.

what is he selling?

 

[Art]

The saga continues: After doinking around with Jim-bob's machine design for two months, he came back with a still failed unit and many more thousands of dollars out of pocket. So now the situation is desperate and he dumps the whole thing on me. Unfortunately, I've had his system here for testing and it turned out that all of the hardware [controls, servo's, etc] was damaged by the power hit.

So I have this guy constantly reminding me that his entire financial future rests on this system. He has been having chest pains - already been to the ER once - and now he's out of money [this includes his retirement money] and inventory and is losing orders. But I think we about have him ready to go again. Today he is getting the servos and at that point he should be ready to rock and roll. But here's the worst part of all: Now that I have a better understanding of his business I have come to realize that he is absolutely insane. He is making nickel and dime widgets for a very limited market - nuts! [He will have to sell about 170,000 widgets just to pay my bill!] It is about the saddest situation I've ever encountered in manufacturing and I don't have the heart to just walk away...and I've never worked with anyone who is so helpless. He is absolutely incapable of understanding any of what's going on.

Why not ask for some equity in his business in payment? If you had a vested interest perhaps you could help redirect him in a more profitable direction.

 

[lisab]

Ugh, sounds like you're in a tough spot.

When you say "insane," do you mean he has real mental health issues, or is he just insanely bad at business? (Well, I think it's a given that he's bad at business!) Does he have any assistants, or family members working there you might talk to?

Or maybe you could suggest SCORE. It's a free mentoring / business counseling service for small businesses, sponsored in part by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

From their web site,

"SCORE's 10,500 volunteer counselors have more than 600 business skills. Volunteers are working or retired business owners, executives and corporate leaders who share their wisdom and lessons learned in business."

http://www.score.org/index.html

If he's in a hopeless situation, maybe one of their counselors could break the bad news to him...or perhaps provide guidance out of the hole he's in.

 

[Pythagorean]

Customers drive me nuts!

that's why I I'm going into research. Of course, once I get to running my own research projects, I'm sure investors = customers.

 

[russ_watters]

:rofl: Wow, that takes some moxy! But, it makes sense. After a while, the time and effort to please someone costs more than just dropping them as a client.

That's nothing. After 6 months of trying to help a client with a simple and cheap problem that he refused to fix on his own and was his fault in the first place (for being cheap and making a substitution against our advice), my boss accidentally responded "all" to an email forwarded through our architect, asking for help. Among other things, my boss responded "this guy wouldn't cross the street to piss on us if we were on fire - what more does he want from us?"

Oops. He wasn't sorry he did it, though. At least it got the phone calls to stop and we'd already gotten paid.

 

[JasonRox]

Why not ask for some equity in his business in payment? If you had a vested interest perhaps you could help redirect him in a more profitable direction.

Because if it falls apart, the banks will go and get money from Ivan since the other guy has none. I would never do this.

I wouldn't help him either.

You need to stand up for yourself.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Yep, hopefully I'll get him going and never see him again. That last thing that I would want is a piece of the "action".

Lisab, I'm not sure if he is just a terrible businessman or if something isn't quite right.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Now he doesn't want to pay his bill, of course!

Luckily I insisted on being paid as we progressed and only agreed to bill for the last couple of thousand dollars. And he was sooooo incensed that I wouldn't just extend credit... He is very religious and insisted that as a Christian [which he mentions frequently ] he would never default on a bill.

 

[turbo]

When somebody mentions their religious beliefs in a discussion about money, RUN. As a programmer, I sometimes did contract work for a guy was claimed to be a Christian and whose brother was an evangelical pastor in my home town. I routinely had to chase that guy and bug him repeatedly to get him to pay up, and there always seemed to be a tear-jerking story to explain why he could skip paying me. When I would get ticked off enough to lose my temper with him and refuse to work on ongoing projects until he paid me, he would trot out the religion card, saying that I could trust him. I'd tell him that project XYZ would get no more of my billable time until he paid up, and then he'd manage to find the money to pay me. The guy and his wife always drove relatively new vehicles, and they lived in a very nice house in a pricey neighborhood, and they always seemed to be short of cash when I submitted my bills.

He had managed to waste weeks worth of a client's development time on his cousin, who accomplished nothing usable during that period. He handed the job to me, with his cousin's all-but-useless code, and I wrote a full inventory-control and wholesale/retail point-of-sale program for a manufacturer of wood-harvesting equipment in less than a week (of VERY long days). The financials from that program flowed directly to the plant's accounting program, which I had extensively customized. He managed not to lose that customer, thanks to my work, but did he pay up? Again, I had to chase him down for money, and even threatened to rat him out to some of his clients before he would pay. I saved his bacon and he tried to stiff me - never worked for him again.

 

[Danger]

Nothing makes me mistrust someone faster than him saying 'You can trust me.'

 

[turbo]

Nothing makes me mistrust someone faster than him saying 'You can trust me.'

That's a bad sign, but when they drag in their religious convictions it is sure poison. Run!

 

[DaveC426913]

I like to teach my kids:

If they have to say "trust me", don't.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

A friend once had a customer, a medium sized company, that was always late paying and that ran up a bill large enough so that service was refused. Robert eventually went into talk to the President and demanded payment before any more work would be done. Finally, this joker pulls out a stack of checks made out to vendors all over town and handed one to Robert - all made out and ready to go. Eventually it became clear that they did this as a practice: Slowly run up a bill and then refuse to pay until they get cut-off and someone visits the President.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

As for this guy, yeah, again, I was just trying to help him out. I figured that by billing net 60 days he would have a chance to get back on his feet.

 

[Danger]

I make no secret of my religious affiliation (semi-militant Atheist), so anyone pulling the Christian crap on me gets one warning in no uncertain terms.
When I was running my company, I always gave 30 days net, then 2%/month. If it wasn't paid within 6 months, I'd just go and repossess the parts.
My favourite experience was when some woman called me to the IGA parking lot because she'd locked her keys in the car. I was in a hurry, so I didn't bother with the traditional fudging around to make it look difficult. I always charged a $15 call-out fee (within town limits), and a flat $10 to open a vehicle. When I presented the invoice, she said "Are you nuts? There's no way I'm paying you $25 for something that took you 2 1/2 seconds."
I said, "Okay", pushed the lock button, and closed the door... with the keys still inside. I just looked at her and said "now it's $35".
She got one of those "you can't treat me like that" looks and said that she was going to call someone else. Unfortunately for her, the only 'someone else' in town was the local towing company, who my best friend worked for. While she was storming off into the store to use the payphone, I called my friend's boss on my cell (one of the first in town), and told him what happened. He cheerfully drove over, opened the car, and charged her $45. I was standing beside my van laughing at her the whole time.
(The reason that I was in a hurry was because I had a favourite show coming on TV, but this was far more entertaining.)

 

[DaveC426913]

I was in a hurry, so I didn't bother with the traditional fudging around to make it look difficult.

My landlord locked his keys in his car, and I had the opportunity to watch a guy in action. He leaves all his stuff in his trunk out on the road, and brings one up with him, fiddles for a bit, goes away, comes back with a different one, goes away, etc. Takes him about 15 minutes. I offer to help, and he (wryly) threatens to take my fingers off.

He charges 75 clams.


Meanwhile, I've managed to open stranded strangers' locks with a coathanger in - yep - about 2 1/2 seconds (no really - down, up, and it's open). I've become quite adept at it.

 

[Danger]

Depends upon the mechanism, of course. This is a weird situation for me. You can get pretty detailed instructions on-line for how to pick locks or open vehicles. That notwithstanding, if I were to tell anyone how to do either, or even let him/her see my picks close-up, I would be put in prison for 14 years with no chance of parole. If I were to break into something, it would be 21 years. The first 14 would be for 'swearing a false oath' (which was my promise before entering Lock Tech College that I would never divulge any proprietary information to anyone; sworn to an RCMP officer). Therefore, I can't really discuss the matter in any detail. It might sound silly, given the internet information readily available, but I can't violate that oath.

 

[DaveC426913]

That notwithstanding, if I were to tell anyone how to do either, or even let him/her see my picks close-up, I would be put in prison for 14 years with no chance of parole. If I were to break into something, it would be 21 years. The first 14 would be for 'swearing a false oath' (which was my promise before entering Lock Tech College that I would never divulge any proprietary information to anyone; sworn to an RCMP officer).

Huh. It had not occurred to me that operators might be bound not to divulge their knowledge. That does put a different slant on it, yes.