Profit and Pigs
My trip to Indiana was interesting to say the least. We went down for a 1 hour meeting, requested by the customer. We ended up sorting parts and staying for 2 days.
The customer has an attitude about something, were not sure if they get this with all suppliers, new suppliers or just our parts suppliers. We never did learn what their problem was but when we left on Wednesday we not only turned around their attitude towards us but also installed confidence in us.
We told them that someone would be down the next day to sort the incoming parts we sent, since we couldn't stay (ran out of underware) and we thought it would continue the warm fuzzy feeling we had installed.
It literally took a phone call to the President of our company from us to get someone to go down the next day and look at the incoming parts. It's not hard work and it would only take a couple hours maximum.
Why so difficult? Well a little background on my company. It use to be a small company, but it's growing. Growing to a tune of 12 times it's revenues in the next 2 years.
In the past they had a product that would basically never present a quality problem, so much in fact they never had a Quality department until 2 years ago when they brought on a new product. So they never had to do customer service, in fact unless they were launching an updated part they never talked to the customer. Yes, the product was that defect free.
Fast-forward to the present.
They have no customer service skills to speak of and are still in the "I don't see why we have to do customer service" mindset. So it's very hard to convince management that this needs to be done to salvage our reputation with the customer. I just hope they don't screw up what we accomplished this week.
Now, onto the customer. The man we had to deal with was the rudest, chevuanistic man I have had to deal with in a long time. He tested my patience a lot. My co-worker was women also and he treated us like stupid women who didn't know a drive-shaft for a steering wheel. And to top it off everytime we were talking with him and a man would come up he would interrupt us and walk off with said man and come back 30-60 minutes later with no apology or explaination and just resume the conversation where he ended it.
Christ I wanted to kick the shit out of that man. And the kicker, the other workers under this man told us that he was doing it on purpose but they had no reason as to why he was doing it and they even thought he was being as ass to us.
.