Recovering from customer failure

If your customer is frustrated or even angry how do you fix it? Despite your best efforts problems can arise. Here's the lesson I learn many years ago.

I had a contract to write code for 2 platforms, it supported a new piece of hardware the customer had designed. I was an expert on one of the platforms so I wrote that code, it was delivered in a few days. I subcontracted the other platform to someone with the appropriate skillset. However, he only completed 90-95% and couldn't solve some very platform-specific issue. I worked with him and days became weeks...

The customer had a product rolling off the production line, but without our software to make it work. The customer has very angry. And they were pretty much mafia. They "invited" me to drive 200 miles to visit them.

I took along an advisor who's a lawyer and exudes authority. I was expecting that one possible outcome was them using baseball bats to get their point across. Following advice I listen for 20 minutes while they repeatedly made it clear that they were very unhappy and hinted that they had a whole cupboard of baseball bats and a manufacturing team available to weald them. Gulp... Then we acknowledged the problem and apologized, I explained how we would solve the problem at our expense and do it quickly. The mood changed and before we left they gave us a factory tour. I did solve their problem and never got to find out if the baseball bats were real or just in my imagination. My conclusion was:

1. If people are unhappy they want to be given the time to tell you and to hear you acknowledge that it is a real problem

2. They really just want their problem to go away, so if you can make that happen they will have relived their stress on you, have solved the problem, and feel they contributed to fixing it.

The result is I have legs that are still straight, the customer was happy to receive the software and ship his product, I was paid, even though I lost some money on the contract. Delays happen, how you deal with it, and solve it for the customer, dictate how the relationship moves forward. Difficult problems are part of engineering, so demonstrating that you can solve those problems can increase the customer's respect and loyalty if handled carefully.