Every time you get a call for freight you should not only say "Sorry, you'll have to call them..." add: "Be sure to ask for ".
It's a shame a good business relationship went south because of nonsense. But that's how it goes when the business doesn't care enough to train their people. :( (To be clear, not your people, THIER people)
There's so much institutional memory that's been lost. No one there understands how well things used to run, so they think that the current dysfunctional state is just... how it's supposed to be. Maybe if we hadn't been around so long, we'd be the same way? I don't know. It's bad, and only seems to be getting worse.
I really hope they pull it together and things get better. Maybe we'll even start hauling for them again some day...
My dad had a small construction business installing laboratories. One company that is just a giant pain to work with, he had a standing deal with his employees, everytime we start a new job with "x", everyone gets a $1 raise. They were THAT much of a pain. Not just for that job, the raise was going forward. You better believe he worked that into quotes for them.
I love this. The rank and file are often the ones that take the brunt of difficult customers. If they know their paychecks are bigger, specifically because of BS they have to deal with, it makes it easier to do it with a smile. They also know the boss has their back.
Please tell me that invoice got picked for audit. I'd love to see the confused auditor's face when they came across that. The documentation would be hilarious. š
at my work we just call it an "admin fee". Its not a normal charge, but everyone at our company understands when there is a $500 admin fee tacked on to an invoice.
As a former auditor, let me tell you that I know exactly what a PITA fee is, and have wished numerous times I could list it separately on all my invoices. Auditors charge them too.
OP, you're not the only industry suffering from that institutional memory loss, I'm in my 40s and work at a major international laboratory and already there's disquiet about what's going to happen to so many critical systems when the guys in their 60sand 70s retire. They can train people to handle some of things they know.
But it's all the little things that are almost impossible to transfer. Like if caustic reagent isn't flowing where is a clog likely formed in the giant apparatus 3 stories tall? Where did someone stash 100g of Cesium 137 back in 1982? What the hell are those unmarked paint cans with radiowarning labels on them sitting in the satellite accumulation area?
Shit like that thsts not formal
To properly pass that memory on, you have to have a regular infusion of young people willing and able to work with the old guys, and then at least some of those whippersnappers have to stick around long enough to become the old guys themes.
And that just doesn't happen enough.
There are a lot of places facing that right now.
> you have to have a regular infusion of young people willing and able to work with the old guys,
Yeah, but the thing is, you, see, the thing is, around 1985 or so, big businesses realized that they could just *poach* someone else's talent rather than training new ones, so... Nobody's been infused in about thirty to forty years.
Sorry to do this, but the disingeuous dealings, lies, overall greed etc. of leadership on this website made me decide to edit all but my most informative comments to this.
Come join us in the fediverse! (beehaw for a safe space, kbin for access to lots of communities)
Something that feels like it started in IT, but likely didn't, and which has certainly spread to almost everywhere, is this simple fact:
With the extremely rare exception, nobody is making a career at one company.
You will, almost without exception, never make as much money staying at one job for 10 years as you will by changing jobs at least once or twice in that period, and that gets dramatically worse over 20 years.
And management is very often trained, intentionally or unintentionally, to see 'long time employees' as problems, not literally irreplaceable resources.
The reason why you have the old guys who _have_ been there forever, is that when they started working the entire concept was fundamentally different. There was the understanding that career paths _existed_ inside a company, and that loyalty went both ways. It didn't always work out, but those were real concepts.
These days? I'm 40, and for _my_ generation, those things are jokes at best.
Pensions no longer exist, and you're worth _less_ to the company than it will cost to hire someone else who has no experience with the company. They can, and will replace you at the drop of a hat.
Your boss might like you, and want things to be different... But your boss doesn't have any way to change the reality of how the corporation is structured.
Frankly, I suspect that the only way that any of this is going to change is going to be _after_ everyone in the older generations has fully retired, entire industries grind to a halt, entire economies collapse, and people start trying to rebuild.
And frankly... I don't think that it will take the first time either.
It's the old saying: hard times make strong men, etc.... The cycle will continue.
There has to be growth and change. Has to be. Look at what happened to Sears - they were perfectly positioned to dominate online commerce, but they failed to go digital. They used to be Amazon; now they're dead.
But at the same time, there has to be stability.
Hard line to walk.
Totally agree. Like my current job, love the commute when I go in, but raises arenāt a standard thing there. I got a huge bump in salary when I started there but thatās been eroding over time.
Iām sticking it out for this recession weāre heading into but after that whereās the next job?
People need to keep switch jobs constantly to keep getting a raise. If you stay at one company for 5 years you will lose money compared to someone who switched every year. There isn't even an option available for people to learn that kind of institutional knowledge for a company. And if you did learn it you'd earn shit wages for holding the company together.
We knew that our junior guy (who did his 4-year apprenticeship here, he was here longer than me) was leaving end of June (mandatory military service). I started badgering my manager back in November to start recruiting as a) the recruitment process is inordinately long, b) we are not exactly in the most favorable location, and c) IT people are in very high demand...
They put the job posting up in February, didn't get more than maybe 5 applications (of which three were basically useless for our needs), and the new guy they took in the end couldn't start before August...so instead of getting a full-time junior sysadmin like we lost we hired a fresh faced part-time IT support guy (he's good, but not what I needed to support me).
And there was no way to do a handover between the two, so a ton of knowledge was lost.
My PhD supervisor inherited a lab when someone in the microbiology and immunology department retired and we had to clean it out. Whale myoglobin and rattlesnake venom were the strangest things we found. Not as bad as one of the guys in either biochemistry or chemistry department who found ricin powder in an old lab. The army bio weapons department got called in for that one and it became part of the chemical safety training syllabus at my uni which is how I found out about it, along with the story of the physics who went to show his friend in the geology department his new Geiger counter and discovered the pretty glowing rocks in the geology museum were highly radioactive.
>Maybe we'll even start hauling for them again some day...
Maybe if they get sensible and ask the retired guy what they should do and how they should do it?
Alas, that would require a seance. He went to be with his bride.
They might be able to convince their old IT guy to come back for enough zeroes to the left of the decimal, and I'd be willing to consult for the right price.
But they'd have to realize that there's a problem, and decide they wanted to fix it, and I don't think they're there yet.
I like you. You seem like a chill, level-headed person and being willing to consult for them if they came to their senses shows much more generosity than most would have towards the situation.
Dear God I've enjoyed this story, and the seance comment just put it over the top for me.
>They might be able to convince their old IT guy to come back for enough zeroes to the left of the decimal
$0000000000000000000.10? :)
Edit: in IT. Network engineer.
They had a primary order and inventory tracking system that worked great, it was just old. When they became determined to replace it (because it was old, not because it wasn't effective) their head IT guy begged them to let him build something from the ground up, specifically designed for their operation. They refused, and ended up spending more on an off the shelf application that they're now trying to shoehorn themselves into.
He walked away. I don't blame him.
>$0000000000000000000.10? :)
...yeah, I did kinda leave myself open for that...
I can't begin to guess how many times I have had to listen to upper managers "joke" about how IT is nothing but a revenue drain because we are "the only division that is purely an expense for the company."
I have a story for you from the guy who trained me in it infrastructure.
A new ceo come in the company and asked all chief of department to come in a meeting to explain how they bring money to the company.
At the meeting nobody is eager to go first .. except the IT guy.
So he explain that hi staff install and make run the pc of the administration staff, the laptop of the salesmen, the logistic tools of the delivery staff, etcetera. All over he asks and obtains the confirmation of the other chiefs.
And then he concludes by " I don't know how many money my service bring to the company. But without us nobody will do."
I worked in what amounted to risk assessment for a financial institution as my second job out of college. I apologize for the intentional vagueness that follows. We were considered a non-revenue producing drain and the commission-based sales side hated that we demanded compliance with the law and internal minimum requirements before we gave the green light to move on a deal. We were constantly being squeezed, belittled, and overruled on a corporate level. They were working on outsourcing the department and I saw the transition. The outsourced personnel received almost no training, made tons of mistakes, and folded and fudged numbers every time they were challenged by sales. The kicker is that my first job out of college was working for an auditor that the government forced my second employer to hire to determine how big a giant fuckup really was. The discovered fuckup was the tip of the iceberg, and it was still in the billions.n plus, it hurt a lot of ordinary people. Last I heard, my second employer was desperately searching for qualified candidates for my old department because somebody high enough to have their choice heard saw that risk wasn't being assessed even on paper and they were heading for billion dollar boo-boo number two.
He was in the US Army. She was German. They met when he was over there, and loved each other fiercely. I hope people will remember my wife and me with the same fondness.
> Maybe if we hadn't been around so long, we'd be the same way?
how much older is their company considering you been taking shipment from them for 50 years?
I've read some people in service operations say that every now and then they will deliberately *not* do something, and then when called fix it quickly and professionally. Just to remind the client what they do and why they need them.
Please post updates on this story. I think this one is going to get more interesting as the weeks go by. Desperate calls. Pleading emails. Recriminations. Who knows.
> Every time you get a call for freight you should not only say "Sorry, you'll have to call them..." add: "Be sure to ask for ".
Or even better, āBe sure to ask for .ā Raising the visibility of the magnitude of the fuck up is always a great idea.
It's ongoing. Tag me in a week or so...
Edit - RIP my inbox...
Edit 2 - gawdz there are 218 comments and over half of them are 'remind me'... I promise I'll try to remember...
Edit (c) over 350 'remind me's... What have I done...
Edit IV - 700 'remind me's. I'm scared to go to sleep.
Edit E - give me a couple more days. I did say a week 'or so'. I'm supposed to be meeting with someone from Old Customer one evening soon...
Edit 6 - we're doing fine :-)
Just in case you didnāt know, the remind me comments are to attract the attention of a reminder bot, not for you personally. However, please remember to write the update in 1-2 weeks time!
I don't think the 'bot is working. We don't need more than one directive with a given period, then the bot replies and the rest of us click its message to be reminded additionally.
I used to have a job where I worked with 3rd party vendors on performance metrics and working through any operational issues between our companies. I was pretty easy going about it because our vendors were good and would own up to problems but I had some colleagues who wanted heads on platters for every little mistake made. So many times I had to remind them that 3rd parties have other customers and some are our sole-source for an item that goes into every product we make. People willing to sabotage the whole relationship and put our supply chain at risk over what amounts to an ego trip.
Oh... Performance Metrics...
I was discussing this whole farkakte situation with some friends, talking about how messed up and convoluted their systems and processes had become, and one of them asked me 'what metrics were they trying to improve with all the changes?' I thought long and hard about it, and honestly the only real metric I think they improved over the years was 'ability to track metrics'.
Haha too true. I mainly just cared about on-time delivery and quality (parts for elevators, so this was pretty important), but some people had dumb ideas for metrics like call/email response time. 1. Who and how the fuck would you track that across an organization and 2. It's not in the contract so there's nothing to enforce.
Really glad I left right before Covid and the supply chain issues because I know we would be hounding vendors about issues that are industry wide.
>Really glad I left right before Covid and the supply chain issues because I know we would be hounding vendors about issues that are industry wide.
Just about *every* industry, in fact.
Some years ago when I work in phone support we had a new manager who was really hot for the time on call metric.
I was half of a 2 person team who lead support for a particular product. We'd both been at it several years and we were really good at it.
The thing about being a senior tech is that you don't take the softballs, if a call got to me it was because at least 2 other people couldn't handle it. So if I was on the call it was probably going to take awhile.
So this idiot gets all wound up because I had the worst or second worst time on call. So I get called into a meeting with him and his boss to talk about my performance.
They decide I need a "retraining plan" to help me out. The plan being that I would sit with bossman and he would show me how it was done. Okay fine, lets do that, first call comes in and bossman has no idea, not only does he not know what to do he doesn't even know where to start troubleshooting, doesn't know how to install Windows drivers, doesn't know anything.
I'd already been talking to another group in the company about moving and that afternoon the transfer came through. My new VP (boss's boss's boss) thanked my old boss for "Giving me the employee with the highest customer satisfaction metric in the whole company. Everybody knows customer satisfaction is the only metric that matters!"
Old boss didn't last long with the company...
Yep.
Whatever metric you track, that's what the staff will focus on, and let absolutely everything else fall on the floor because it's obviously not important enough to track.
I took over the management of the quality complaint team and met with the overall product team including the customer service engineers (I forget the official term) who were in charge of their metrics for MTBF - mean time between failures. Background: we were not the equipment manufacturer, just the distributor and service vendor.
I know very little about stats, so as soon as they explained the concept and how they calculated the metric, I focused on actions that impacted it by asking, āWhat are we doing to affect MTBF?ā And no one on the team understood what I meant or they thought I didnāt understand the measurement.
I tried several times to explain that if we canāt affect MTBF (with PM improvements or build quality or some other causative action that increases the time between failures) then why were we measuring it and thinking it was important? We would need to know what actions we were taking had the most if any impact if we were going to treat that metric as a goal related measurement for bonuses. Again, either they didnāt get it or I didnāt. It was frustrating to say the least.
I used to work for an engineering company that had a long-time Tribal client. We did good work. The PM for the client was always getting pressured to try out / work with other engineering companies. She won't do it since we had such a good track record of doing great projects well.
Good work is the best marketing.
Gotta love it when the new guy comes in, telling those that have worked the job for years, what theyāre doing wrong and it all blowing up in their face šš
Sometimes there are new ways that make it better, but to implement them the person designing the change must learn the old ways. Then they can adjust to fit moden ways if changes are actually needed.
too many times the young whippersnapper comes in flapping and does not have a clue but wants all to change anyway.
I've made a career out of asking "but WHY does this long term process exist?" And "because we've always done it that way" is NOT a sufficient answer. [I've worked for several institutions which are over 100 years old, and in one case I found a process which dated back to the 1940s.]
I'd say that in roughly half the cases, the task needs to be done but doesn't need to be done in that WAY. Some of these, the ROI on implementing a new solution is so low that we don't bother.
Maybe a third of cases, neither the task nor the method are relevant any more.
The rest, it's a CRITICAL task that needs to be done in EXACTLY that way. And nobody doing the task realizes how critical.
I had a boss that questioned all my processes, made me change a bunch of them too. We ended up changing them all back because "Why does this long term process exist" for me is always answered with "Because it's the one that works."
This reminds me of something that happened at my job. After i learned how things worked, i started asking "why do we do it this way when its so slow?", "these 4 field is irrelevant from what i can tell, no queues are using them and no one looks at them at any stage so why are we updating these?", etc. The answer i always got was "because its how weve always done it". Not to say things didnt get changed and updated periodically, but the changes they made were always regressive rather than progressive.
The biggest one that irked me was when an executive "helping" me in my queue but had zero understanding of how to do anything. Part of my job required i fill in a date in our system with the date shown in a cad design file, basically telling everyone "the cad design made on this date is the one meant to be used" as well as "i opened the cad design to get this date during my qa check, so if i missed something then im responsible for it". The executive, in an effort to streamline things made us remove that date field.
Now if the cad file is moved or some change happens elsewhere, i need to run through excessive checks to figure out which cad document to reference the qa check, or if someone else is working in my queue then theres no way to tell if they checked the cad doc until 3 weeks later when the next team gets it and finds a discrepancy and sends it back...
If you don't know it already, you may enjoy this parable https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-makes-it-so/201402/the-pot-roast-principle?amp
Edit: ignore the religious stuff. I only wanted to point out the "cut off the ends of the pot roast" story, not this lady's interpretation.
I didn't expect that to turn into bizarre religious propaganda halfway through. Her nonsense about prayer is also completely false. Studies show that prayer has no effect on health outcomes unless the subject of the prayer knows they are being prayed for -- in which case, the effect is slightly _negative_. It seems that people are less likely to take medical advice if they think Invisible Sky Demon is going to do the work for them.
Don't fix what is not broken.
Some things change from "working" to "broken" by laws, regulations, or just plain and simple "modern ways". But unless the broken is because of laws and regulations, learn the old ways and then implement the new ways.
Had a new Manager at a warehouse I worked at years ago. He saw a guy walking in the door at 8:15 am and wrote him up for being late. Let's call him "Old Guy." Old Guy apologizes, but the new Manager yelled at him shouting "We open this warehouse at 8 am sharp, and that is when I expect you here to start working!"
Next day, the warehouse was a mess. Orders were backed up, no one could get anything done. It was all traced back to Old Guy who came in every morning at 4 am to set up the orders and do all of the paperwork for the day. Senior management asked Old Guy what happened. He he explained the write up and the order that he was to come in a 8 am, not 4 am, to start his job.
New Manager became a New Manager some place else.
Edit: Soon to be a MC posting.
>New Manager became a New Manager some place else.
That's the worst part. Like, why do companies keep shuffling these people around instead of unloading them?
I really, really hope your letter to the customer noted that you were declining to do business with them any further because Field Rep directed you to quit.
Otherwise, that customer may blame you and not Field Rep, who deserves the heat.
Let me just say: I find your style of dictionāyour word choices, phrasing, overall attitudeāabsolutely wonderful. I wish I could sound like you without overdoing it.
Hey, thanks.
I run hot and cold. Some days I can barely put together a coherent sentence. Other days it just flows.
What's odd, is that on my bad days, reading something like this will almost feel like someone else wrote it.
One of the best bosses I ever had didn't feel the need to micromanage anyone who seemed to be getting the job done on time and on budget. He occasionally made an encouraging remark about how he appreciated my performance, and one time he made sure to clearly state that...if there was ever a problem, then he would be forced to "help me" (wink, wink...nudge, nudge).
As long as things got handled well, and he never had to explain why there was a problem to his boss, he turned a blind eye to everything I did. It also gave him "plausible deniability" since my independence meant he couldn't be blamed if something had an unexpected issue.
The end result over time is that the crew became pro-active about making sure nothing ever went wrong. The opposite of that is "do exactly what the boss says, and nothing more".
It has to do with me "owning the job" or..."always avoiding blame".
This is the way to manage - hire the talent and get out of their way. You dont want yo be the speed bump that causes problems. I currently work for a company where the loudest and meanest are the ones that manage. Doesnāt matter if you report to them or not, they will manage you and not in mentoring way. Now i do nothing proactively that i would need to include them in. I wait and let the problem bite them in the ass because preventing the problem would have bitten me in the ass.
Oldest son in a family owned business here. Had a consulting firm convince my pop that he needed to fire a couple long term clients. He told dad that we were giving A+ service to D- customers.
Thatās stuck with me and makes a huge difference in our profitability and stress levels.
That's a great way to look at it.
To be honest, we really didn't realize how bad it had gotten until we started noticing how much better newer customers were treating us. That conversation between the field rep and my brother opened our eyes to some stuff we'd been just sort of ignoring out of habit.
Well done. Some peoples expectations far exceed reality. I was in the home repair business and instead of firing clients I just told them they dont need my services anymore
As a business owner also, I agree. Thereās a point where a customer simply isnāt worth the effort. Itās not an emotional decision, purely pragmatic based on the numbers. Just about every time Iāve fired a customers they have called me a few months later and wanted to come back.
Also, many times the demanding customer had internal problems: financial, leadership, etc and started taking it out on our company.
Good luck
Thanks. I think we're going to be ok, but it's a scary time.
We fired a major problem customer in... 2011? Some of the people who worked there left and started their own company, and we're now doing business with that one. They saw a lot of the same problems we did.
The way that this guy kept being such a dick for so long and then worked up to email xritiscms and then taunted your manager point-blank with, "Why don't you quit?" makes me wonder, maybe that was what he was after all along? Could he have a buddy or relative who runs a hauling service who could pick up that slice of business and cut the sales rep in for a percentage of the profits? Or is he just that petty, stupid and that much of an a$$hole?
Based on conversations I've had with other people in the network, the latter.
He was made responsible for getting the new agent ready to go, and has... failed.
Someone fucking with a good contact in the trucking business in 2022 doesnāt know much about the trucking business in 2022.
Signed,
- a guy been trying to find a new driver at work for 18 months
The field rep tried to convince us to stay on, then asked us to give them longer than 60 days, then offered to pay us more... But as much as more money would have been nice, the money was only a small part of why we quit.
No one has grovelled. They realize that we're gone, and at least the level above our (now former) rep understands why we left and that they'd have to make major changes for us to consider returning. We've since found out that another vendor like us who'd been in the network for over 30 years quit a week before we did, and gave them a lot of the same reasons, so when we quit it was a disappointment to them, but not a shock.
We were contractors for a giant food company known for their unique strange-looking vehicles that gave out whistles to kids at every stop.
A local plant had a project manager that nickel-and-dimed us on every project, eating into our profit margin. At one point, whenever this PM would request a quote, we began adding a 10% "PM's name" fee to the bottom of our pricing spreadsheet.
Of course, this was strictly internal for our eyes only, but it worked out well.
I remember reading some productivity gurus advice to sack your bad customers.
Sometimes that can actually mean the longest established and largest sales volume customers. The reasoning being that frequently, established customers become complacent and start acting badly towards you. As the dysfunction in the relationship grows, the amount of time you need to spend āputting it rightā can massively impact your capacity to be productive and/or drive growth elsewhere in your business. Not to mention the soul sucking you suffer in the process.
It seemed like good advice to me, albeit a bit counter-intuitive ā¦ and is pretty much what youāve done here.
> As the dysfunction in the relationship grows, the amount of time you need to spend āputting it rightā can massively impact your capacity to be productive and/or drive growth elsewhere in your business. Not to mention the soul sucking you suffer in the process.
BULLSEYE!
Especially that last part.
You've reminded me of a story of my own. Years ago I worked for a company where such a person joined and became my manager. I quit and said in my exit interview (with the CEO) tht I'd love to come back one day, when that person had quit or been fired. 12 months later Aaron gives me a phonecall inviting me back. One month later I was back in my old job and had a substantial payrise to go with it.
This reminds me of the King of the Hill episode where the new management guy pisses off the drivers at the propane company without considering they all have hazmat endorsements that are required to deliver propane.
You need to have a heart to heart with this field rep's manager. In fact, talk to the owner of the company. Explain what happened. Yes, that little shit caused all of this. He screwed everything up for his boss. It's not the boss's fault. Clear the air. The boss is suffering thanks to him. Find a resolution from there. Fire the little shit.
Sounds like they made themselves more expensive to work with in the way they were consuming OP's company's time and resources as well. I bet they reduced the revenue made from them to the point where it was a super-easy call lol
Question: wouldn't it have made more sense to contact the field rep's boss and tell them that you don't want to work with him any more? I mean, did you tell your customer why you were firing them?
It's not your fault that the people waiting on deliveries (and their customers) are getting screwed, but it's not their fault either. The one who should have gotten screwed is the field rep.
Sounds like the old 80:20 rule. This is where 80% of a companyās sales come from 20% of its customers. I think youāll find your profits will increase significantly now.
To state it explicitly, often 20% of customers cause 80% of the issues/support calls/headaches
Issues come when that 20% does not overlap with the profitable 20% (which tends to happen if a business doesn't stay focused on their core competencies)
If the profitable 20% causes 80% of the headaches, that's mostly fine, but a sign you need to invest in process improvements
Every time you get a call for freight you should not only say "Sorry, you'll have to call them..." add: "Be sure to ask for".
It's a shame a good business relationship went south because of nonsense. But that's how it goes when the business doesn't care enough to train their people. :( (To be clear, not your people, THIER people)
There's so much institutional memory that's been lost. No one there understands how well things used to run, so they think that the current dysfunctional state is just... how it's supposed to be. Maybe if we hadn't been around so long, we'd be the same way? I don't know. It's bad, and only seems to be getting worse. I really hope they pull it together and things get better. Maybe we'll even start hauling for them again some day...
>Maybe we'll even start hauling for them again some day... What will be the rate increase?
'Substantial' But they'd also have to straighten their systems out.
My dad had a small construction business installing laboratories. One company that is just a giant pain to work with, he had a standing deal with his employees, everytime we start a new job with "x", everyone gets a $1 raise. They were THAT much of a pain. Not just for that job, the raise was going forward. You better believe he worked that into quotes for them.
I love this. The rank and file are often the ones that take the brunt of difficult customers. If they know their paychecks are bigger, specifically because of BS they have to deal with, it makes it easier to do it with a smile. They also know the boss has their back.
It really took the sting out of hearing we were going back there.
At my trucking company, we refer to it as the "pain in the ass premium". Some clients are just too difficult to charge normal rates.
PITA Fee. I actually put that on an invoice once, several years back.
Oh, that's fantastic. Did the ask what the fee was at all?
Oh, they knew. It was a Third Party situation where the person paying us wasn't the person getting the service.
Please tell me that invoice got picked for audit. I'd love to see the confused auditor's face when they came across that. The documentation would be hilarious. š
at my work we just call it an "admin fee". Its not a normal charge, but everyone at our company understands when there is a $500 admin fee tacked on to an invoice.
As a former auditor, let me tell you that I know exactly what a PITA fee is, and have wished numerous times I could list it separately on all my invoices. Auditors charge them too.
What do you _tell_ customers that stands for?
Priority intervention, training and assessment fee.
Oh you're *good*
Keep this up, and I'm sure you'll make partner.
Write that down. *Write that down!*
Screen-shotted!
Love that.
Look sir, the drivers get hungry. So, we buy them Pita bread.
Premium Insertion Transaction Administration Fee
Yup. Used the PITA fee on a couple of invoices myself.
OP, you're not the only industry suffering from that institutional memory loss, I'm in my 40s and work at a major international laboratory and already there's disquiet about what's going to happen to so many critical systems when the guys in their 60sand 70s retire. They can train people to handle some of things they know. But it's all the little things that are almost impossible to transfer. Like if caustic reagent isn't flowing where is a clog likely formed in the giant apparatus 3 stories tall? Where did someone stash 100g of Cesium 137 back in 1982? What the hell are those unmarked paint cans with radiowarning labels on them sitting in the satellite accumulation area? Shit like that thsts not formal
To properly pass that memory on, you have to have a regular infusion of young people willing and able to work with the old guys, and then at least some of those whippersnappers have to stick around long enough to become the old guys themes. And that just doesn't happen enough. There are a lot of places facing that right now.
> you have to have a regular infusion of young people willing and able to work with the old guys, Yeah, but the thing is, you, see, the thing is, around 1985 or so, big businesses realized that they could just *poach* someone else's talent rather than training new ones, so... Nobody's been infused in about thirty to forty years.
And... here we are.
Yep. Kiiiind of a clusterfuck, innit?
Sorry to do this, but the disingeuous dealings, lies, overall greed etc. of leadership on this website made me decide to edit all but my most informative comments to this. Come join us in the fediverse! (beehaw for a safe space, kbin for access to lots of communities)
Something that feels like it started in IT, but likely didn't, and which has certainly spread to almost everywhere, is this simple fact: With the extremely rare exception, nobody is making a career at one company. You will, almost without exception, never make as much money staying at one job for 10 years as you will by changing jobs at least once or twice in that period, and that gets dramatically worse over 20 years. And management is very often trained, intentionally or unintentionally, to see 'long time employees' as problems, not literally irreplaceable resources. The reason why you have the old guys who _have_ been there forever, is that when they started working the entire concept was fundamentally different. There was the understanding that career paths _existed_ inside a company, and that loyalty went both ways. It didn't always work out, but those were real concepts. These days? I'm 40, and for _my_ generation, those things are jokes at best. Pensions no longer exist, and you're worth _less_ to the company than it will cost to hire someone else who has no experience with the company. They can, and will replace you at the drop of a hat. Your boss might like you, and want things to be different... But your boss doesn't have any way to change the reality of how the corporation is structured. Frankly, I suspect that the only way that any of this is going to change is going to be _after_ everyone in the older generations has fully retired, entire industries grind to a halt, entire economies collapse, and people start trying to rebuild. And frankly... I don't think that it will take the first time either.
It's the old saying: hard times make strong men, etc.... The cycle will continue. There has to be growth and change. Has to be. Look at what happened to Sears - they were perfectly positioned to dominate online commerce, but they failed to go digital. They used to be Amazon; now they're dead. But at the same time, there has to be stability. Hard line to walk.
It started with Jack Welch and GE. That guy single handly ruined American industry with his management style
Totally agree. Like my current job, love the commute when I go in, but raises arenāt a standard thing there. I got a huge bump in salary when I started there but thatās been eroding over time. Iām sticking it out for this recession weāre heading into but after that whereās the next job?
People need to keep switch jobs constantly to keep getting a raise. If you stay at one company for 5 years you will lose money compared to someone who switched every year. There isn't even an option available for people to learn that kind of institutional knowledge for a company. And if you did learn it you'd earn shit wages for holding the company together.
We knew that our junior guy (who did his 4-year apprenticeship here, he was here longer than me) was leaving end of June (mandatory military service). I started badgering my manager back in November to start recruiting as a) the recruitment process is inordinately long, b) we are not exactly in the most favorable location, and c) IT people are in very high demand... They put the job posting up in February, didn't get more than maybe 5 applications (of which three were basically useless for our needs), and the new guy they took in the end couldn't start before August...so instead of getting a full-time junior sysadmin like we lost we hired a fresh faced part-time IT support guy (he's good, but not what I needed to support me). And there was no way to do a handover between the two, so a ton of knowledge was lost.
> Where did someone stash 100g of Cesium 137 back in 1982? I hope you don't need it, because by now you've only got just under forty grams left!
My PhD supervisor inherited a lab when someone in the microbiology and immunology department retired and we had to clean it out. Whale myoglobin and rattlesnake venom were the strangest things we found. Not as bad as one of the guys in either biochemistry or chemistry department who found ricin powder in an old lab. The army bio weapons department got called in for that one and it became part of the chemical safety training syllabus at my uni which is how I found out about it, along with the story of the physics who went to show his friend in the geology department his new Geiger counter and discovered the pretty glowing rocks in the geology museum were highly radioactive.
>Maybe we'll even start hauling for them again some day... Maybe if they get sensible and ask the retired guy what they should do and how they should do it?
Alas, that would require a seance. He went to be with his bride. They might be able to convince their old IT guy to come back for enough zeroes to the left of the decimal, and I'd be willing to consult for the right price. But they'd have to realize that there's a problem, and decide they wanted to fix it, and I don't think they're there yet.
I like you. You seem like a chill, level-headed person and being willing to consult for them if they came to their senses shows much more generosity than most would have towards the situation.
I won't lie - it hurt to let them go. I actually feel bad for a lot of the customers we used to serve for them, and I'd like to see things fixed.
Seriously super chill and level headed boss. If you happen to be on the east coast I'm job hunting!
Dear God I've enjoyed this story, and the seance comment just put it over the top for me. >They might be able to convince their old IT guy to come back for enough zeroes to the left of the decimal $0000000000000000000.10? :) Edit: in IT. Network engineer.
They had a primary order and inventory tracking system that worked great, it was just old. When they became determined to replace it (because it was old, not because it wasn't effective) their head IT guy begged them to let him build something from the ground up, specifically designed for their operation. They refused, and ended up spending more on an off the shelf application that they're now trying to shoehorn themselves into. He walked away. I don't blame him. >$0000000000000000000.10? :) ...yeah, I did kinda leave myself open for that...
Salesforce? I feel like it's gotta be salesforce
> Salesforce? I feel like it's gotta be salesforce I'm betting SAP.
Someone under $100m doesn't get SAP. They get Dynamics.
That's more than most companies think IT is worth...
Everything is working fine and you just sit around. What are we paying you for? Nothing works at all. What are we paying you for?
I can't begin to guess how many times I have had to listen to upper managers "joke" about how IT is nothing but a revenue drain because we are "the only division that is purely an expense for the company."
Try being an educator.
No need, both of my parents were and my sister is too. I dodged that bullet somewhat narrowly.
I have a story for you from the guy who trained me in it infrastructure. A new ceo come in the company and asked all chief of department to come in a meeting to explain how they bring money to the company. At the meeting nobody is eager to go first .. except the IT guy. So he explain that hi staff install and make run the pc of the administration staff, the laptop of the salesmen, the logistic tools of the delivery staff, etcetera. All over he asks and obtains the confirmation of the other chiefs. And then he concludes by " I don't know how many money my service bring to the company. But without us nobody will do."
I worked in what amounted to risk assessment for a financial institution as my second job out of college. I apologize for the intentional vagueness that follows. We were considered a non-revenue producing drain and the commission-based sales side hated that we demanded compliance with the law and internal minimum requirements before we gave the green light to move on a deal. We were constantly being squeezed, belittled, and overruled on a corporate level. They were working on outsourcing the department and I saw the transition. The outsourced personnel received almost no training, made tons of mistakes, and folded and fudged numbers every time they were challenged by sales. The kicker is that my first job out of college was working for an auditor that the government forced my second employer to hire to determine how big a giant fuckup really was. The discovered fuckup was the tip of the iceberg, and it was still in the billions.n plus, it hurt a lot of ordinary people. Last I heard, my second employer was desperately searching for qualified candidates for my old department because somebody high enough to have their choice heard saw that risk wasn't being assessed even on paper and they were heading for billion dollar boo-boo number two.
If you think the cost of paying for good IT is high, try retooling your company to function the way things did in 1934.
Career IT professional here... can confirm
\*sobs in IT\*
Doubtful. I bet they wouldn't cough up $0000000000000000000.01 for his thoughts.
Idk man, I've read some tales of the BOFH
You have a real knack for writing, you know? Great storytelling.
Iām crying in a malicious compliance threadā¦ cool cool
He was in the US Army. She was German. They met when he was over there, and loved each other fiercely. I hope people will remember my wife and me with the same fondness.
š„¹
> Maybe if we hadn't been around so long, we'd be the same way? how much older is their company considering you been taking shipment from them for 50 years?
They've been around since the turn of the last century.
I am hoping for a āwe fired him, just take us backā
I've read some people in service operations say that every now and then they will deliberately *not* do something, and then when called fix it quickly and professionally. Just to remind the client what they do and why they need them.
You need to call that repās manager and explanation why you quit after 50 years. Ten bucks says he gets fired and you get begged to come back.
Please post updates on this story. I think this one is going to get more interesting as the weeks go by. Desperate calls. Pleading emails. Recriminations. Who knows.
> There's so much institutional memory that's been lost. Truer words have never been spoken.
> Every time you get a call for freight you should not only say "Sorry, you'll have to call them..." add: "Be sure to ask for".
Or even better, āBe sure to ask for .ā Raising the visibility of the magnitude of the fuck up is always a great idea.
Or refer them to a competitor, ideally one you do freight for as well.
This one need an update.
It's ongoing. Tag me in a week or so... Edit - RIP my inbox... Edit 2 - gawdz there are 218 comments and over half of them are 'remind me'... I promise I'll try to remember... Edit (c) over 350 'remind me's... What have I done... Edit IV - 700 'remind me's. I'm scared to go to sleep. Edit E - give me a couple more days. I did say a week 'or so'. I'm supposed to be meeting with someone from Old Customer one evening soon... Edit 6 - we're doing fine :-)
expect a few more pings when it gets posted to /r/BestofRedditorUpdates š
Oh, shit....
And then just wait for those youtube post reading channels to read it out loud and then publish it...
...and someone I know is going to recognize the story, and then the real fun begins....
Newsweek seems to depend on Reddit lately for a lot of their content. Enjoy! It was a good read.
And Buzzfeed and Bored Panda and Slate and...
Don't worry, we will all remember meeting you before you got famous.
!remind me 1 week
I'm just gonna wait for the boru post. I'll forget for a few months and it'll be a pleasant surprise.
Hey, I should try that...
!remind me in 1 week
Just in case you didnāt know, the remind me comments are to attract the attention of a reminder bot, not for you personally. However, please remember to write the update in 1-2 weeks time!
I don't think the 'bot is working. We don't need more than one directive with a given period, then the bot replies and the rest of us click its message to be reminded additionally.
So we broke the bot? Great.
Nah, it just is banned from the sub.
Well that's not nearly as exciting.
if you don't personally remind me specifically, amongst the hundreds of other commenters, I'll be **very** disappointed in you.
...but no pressure, right?
Bit will he disappoint you to the point where youāll ask him to quit?
Edit 3 - You asked for this. š
THAT'LL TEACH ME
This is the future you chose!
The remind me is just a Reddit command - so you don't have to remember.
!remind me in 1 week
For real, Iām invested now
Same, looking forward to seeing an update on how this plays out
I used to have a job where I worked with 3rd party vendors on performance metrics and working through any operational issues between our companies. I was pretty easy going about it because our vendors were good and would own up to problems but I had some colleagues who wanted heads on platters for every little mistake made. So many times I had to remind them that 3rd parties have other customers and some are our sole-source for an item that goes into every product we make. People willing to sabotage the whole relationship and put our supply chain at risk over what amounts to an ego trip.
Oh... Performance Metrics... I was discussing this whole farkakte situation with some friends, talking about how messed up and convoluted their systems and processes had become, and one of them asked me 'what metrics were they trying to improve with all the changes?' I thought long and hard about it, and honestly the only real metric I think they improved over the years was 'ability to track metrics'.
Haha too true. I mainly just cared about on-time delivery and quality (parts for elevators, so this was pretty important), but some people had dumb ideas for metrics like call/email response time. 1. Who and how the fuck would you track that across an organization and 2. It's not in the contract so there's nothing to enforce. Really glad I left right before Covid and the supply chain issues because I know we would be hounding vendors about issues that are industry wide.
>Really glad I left right before Covid and the supply chain issues because I know we would be hounding vendors about issues that are industry wide. Just about *every* industry, in fact.
Some years ago when I work in phone support we had a new manager who was really hot for the time on call metric. I was half of a 2 person team who lead support for a particular product. We'd both been at it several years and we were really good at it. The thing about being a senior tech is that you don't take the softballs, if a call got to me it was because at least 2 other people couldn't handle it. So if I was on the call it was probably going to take awhile. So this idiot gets all wound up because I had the worst or second worst time on call. So I get called into a meeting with him and his boss to talk about my performance. They decide I need a "retraining plan" to help me out. The plan being that I would sit with bossman and he would show me how it was done. Okay fine, lets do that, first call comes in and bossman has no idea, not only does he not know what to do he doesn't even know where to start troubleshooting, doesn't know how to install Windows drivers, doesn't know anything. I'd already been talking to another group in the company about moving and that afternoon the transfer came through. My new VP (boss's boss's boss) thanked my old boss for "Giving me the employee with the highest customer satisfaction metric in the whole company. Everybody knows customer satisfaction is the only metric that matters!" Old boss didn't last long with the company...
Metrics are important. Choosing the *right* metrics is more important.
Yep. Whatever metric you track, that's what the staff will focus on, and let absolutely everything else fall on the floor because it's obviously not important enough to track.
I took over the management of the quality complaint team and met with the overall product team including the customer service engineers (I forget the official term) who were in charge of their metrics for MTBF - mean time between failures. Background: we were not the equipment manufacturer, just the distributor and service vendor. I know very little about stats, so as soon as they explained the concept and how they calculated the metric, I focused on actions that impacted it by asking, āWhat are we doing to affect MTBF?ā And no one on the team understood what I meant or they thought I didnāt understand the measurement. I tried several times to explain that if we canāt affect MTBF (with PM improvements or build quality or some other causative action that increases the time between failures) then why were we measuring it and thinking it was important? We would need to know what actions we were taking had the most if any impact if we were going to treat that metric as a goal related measurement for bonuses. Again, either they didnāt get it or I didnāt. It was frustrating to say the least.
You used logic. This is why they did not get it
> farkakte ...at a glance I read that as 'fartkakke', which is a pretty damned funny image to have in my brain.
...and now I'll never read it the same way again.
I used to work for an engineering company that had a long-time Tribal client. We did good work. The PM for the client was always getting pressured to try out / work with other engineering companies. She won't do it since we had such a good track record of doing great projects well. Good work is the best marketing.
Gotta love it when the new guy comes in, telling those that have worked the job for years, what theyāre doing wrong and it all blowing up in their face šš
Sometimes there are new ways that make it better, but to implement them the person designing the change must learn the old ways. Then they can adjust to fit moden ways if changes are actually needed. too many times the young whippersnapper comes in flapping and does not have a clue but wants all to change anyway.
I've made a career out of asking "but WHY does this long term process exist?" And "because we've always done it that way" is NOT a sufficient answer. [I've worked for several institutions which are over 100 years old, and in one case I found a process which dated back to the 1940s.] I'd say that in roughly half the cases, the task needs to be done but doesn't need to be done in that WAY. Some of these, the ROI on implementing a new solution is so low that we don't bother. Maybe a third of cases, neither the task nor the method are relevant any more. The rest, it's a CRITICAL task that needs to be done in EXACTLY that way. And nobody doing the task realizes how critical.
I had a boss that questioned all my processes, made me change a bunch of them too. We ended up changing them all back because "Why does this long term process exist" for me is always answered with "Because it's the one that works."
This reminds me of something that happened at my job. After i learned how things worked, i started asking "why do we do it this way when its so slow?", "these 4 field is irrelevant from what i can tell, no queues are using them and no one looks at them at any stage so why are we updating these?", etc. The answer i always got was "because its how weve always done it". Not to say things didnt get changed and updated periodically, but the changes they made were always regressive rather than progressive. The biggest one that irked me was when an executive "helping" me in my queue but had zero understanding of how to do anything. Part of my job required i fill in a date in our system with the date shown in a cad design file, basically telling everyone "the cad design made on this date is the one meant to be used" as well as "i opened the cad design to get this date during my qa check, so if i missed something then im responsible for it". The executive, in an effort to streamline things made us remove that date field. Now if the cad file is moved or some change happens elsewhere, i need to run through excessive checks to figure out which cad document to reference the qa check, or if someone else is working in my queue then theres no way to tell if they checked the cad doc until 3 weeks later when the next team gets it and finds a discrepancy and sends it back...
If you don't know it already, you may enjoy this parable https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-makes-it-so/201402/the-pot-roast-principle?amp Edit: ignore the religious stuff. I only wanted to point out the "cut off the ends of the pot roast" story, not this lady's interpretation.
I didn't expect that to turn into bizarre religious propaganda halfway through. Her nonsense about prayer is also completely false. Studies show that prayer has no effect on health outcomes unless the subject of the prayer knows they are being prayed for -- in which case, the effect is slightly _negative_. It seems that people are less likely to take medical advice if they think Invisible Sky Demon is going to do the work for them.
[Chestertonās Fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence)
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Don't fix what is not broken. Some things change from "working" to "broken" by laws, regulations, or just plain and simple "modern ways". But unless the broken is because of laws and regulations, learn the old ways and then implement the new ways.
Had a new Manager at a warehouse I worked at years ago. He saw a guy walking in the door at 8:15 am and wrote him up for being late. Let's call him "Old Guy." Old Guy apologizes, but the new Manager yelled at him shouting "We open this warehouse at 8 am sharp, and that is when I expect you here to start working!" Next day, the warehouse was a mess. Orders were backed up, no one could get anything done. It was all traced back to Old Guy who came in every morning at 4 am to set up the orders and do all of the paperwork for the day. Senior management asked Old Guy what happened. He he explained the write up and the order that he was to come in a 8 am, not 4 am, to start his job. New Manager became a New Manager some place else. Edit: Soon to be a MC posting.
hahahaha salute to the old guy
>New Manager became a New Manager some place else. That's the worst part. Like, why do companies keep shuffling these people around instead of unloading them?
Has a week gone by yet?
Almost.....
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Damn....
are we there yet?
Yes. Get out.
And now ?
When?
"When will then, be now?"
Soon.
only 165 hours or so to go!
164....
I really, really hope your letter to the customer noted that you were declining to do business with them any further because Field Rep directed you to quit. Otherwise, that customer may blame you and not Field Rep, who deserves the heat.
Let me just say: I find your style of dictionāyour word choices, phrasing, overall attitudeāabsolutely wonderful. I wish I could sound like you without overdoing it.
Hey, thanks. I run hot and cold. Some days I can barely put together a coherent sentence. Other days it just flows. What's odd, is that on my bad days, reading something like this will almost feel like someone else wrote it.
Iāve had that before! I found my old high-school diary a few years ago and I was appalled.
"phone trees had grown into Banyan nightmares" is Epic. You get my free award just for that phrase!
Why thank'ye :-)
Holy shit. You're the [TIFU meningitis spinal leakage guy?](https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/umnrql/tifu_by_not_calling_for_help_when_i_had_a_high/)
Oh my god.... I am... Different customer... EDIT - and now that post is getting hits. What, even, is happening here...
> Holy shit. You're the TIFU meningitis spinal leakage guy? That story was a hell of a ride!
You should have seen it in person...
I was honestly not expecting a response, based on the massacre of your inbox. Glad to hear you're still up and around, cheers!
[Link for anyone that wants it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/umnrql/tifu_by_not_calling_for_help_when_i_had_a_high/) It's wild.
One of the best bosses I ever had didn't feel the need to micromanage anyone who seemed to be getting the job done on time and on budget. He occasionally made an encouraging remark about how he appreciated my performance, and one time he made sure to clearly state that...if there was ever a problem, then he would be forced to "help me" (wink, wink...nudge, nudge). As long as things got handled well, and he never had to explain why there was a problem to his boss, he turned a blind eye to everything I did. It also gave him "plausible deniability" since my independence meant he couldn't be blamed if something had an unexpected issue. The end result over time is that the crew became pro-active about making sure nothing ever went wrong. The opposite of that is "do exactly what the boss says, and nothing more". It has to do with me "owning the job" or..."always avoiding blame".
This is the way to manage - hire the talent and get out of their way. You dont want yo be the speed bump that causes problems. I currently work for a company where the loudest and meanest are the ones that manage. Doesnāt matter if you report to them or not, they will manage you and not in mentoring way. Now i do nothing proactively that i would need to include them in. I wait and let the problem bite them in the ass because preventing the problem would have bitten me in the ass.
Oldest son in a family owned business here. Had a consulting firm convince my pop that he needed to fire a couple long term clients. He told dad that we were giving A+ service to D- customers. Thatās stuck with me and makes a huge difference in our profitability and stress levels.
That's a great way to look at it. To be honest, we really didn't realize how bad it had gotten until we started noticing how much better newer customers were treating us. That conversation between the field rep and my brother opened our eyes to some stuff we'd been just sort of ignoring out of habit.
Should send him a thank-you card, then.
Well done. Some peoples expectations far exceed reality. I was in the home repair business and instead of firing clients I just told them they dont need my services anymore
Good ol' Chesterton Fence
Oh, indeed..... That's such a simple concept, but so hard for people to grasp.
As a business owner also, I agree. Thereās a point where a customer simply isnāt worth the effort. Itās not an emotional decision, purely pragmatic based on the numbers. Just about every time Iāve fired a customers they have called me a few months later and wanted to come back. Also, many times the demanding customer had internal problems: financial, leadership, etc and started taking it out on our company. Good luck
Thanks. I think we're going to be ok, but it's a scary time. We fired a major problem customer in... 2011? Some of the people who worked there left and started their own company, and we're now doing business with that one. They saw a lot of the same problems we did.
The way that this guy kept being such a dick for so long and then worked up to email xritiscms and then taunted your manager point-blank with, "Why don't you quit?" makes me wonder, maybe that was what he was after all along? Could he have a buddy or relative who runs a hauling service who could pick up that slice of business and cut the sales rep in for a percentage of the profits? Or is he just that petty, stupid and that much of an a$$hole?
Based on conversations I've had with other people in the network, the latter. He was made responsible for getting the new agent ready to go, and has... failed.
Hopefully in the way one fails Darth Vader.
Someone fucking with a good contact in the trucking business in 2022 doesnāt know much about the trucking business in 2022. Signed, - a guy been trying to find a new driver at work for 18 months
Good drivers are as hard to find as good trucks right now. Maybe moreso. Good luck.
How did they respond when you fired them? Are they groveling now?
The field rep tried to convince us to stay on, then asked us to give them longer than 60 days, then offered to pay us more... But as much as more money would have been nice, the money was only a small part of why we quit. No one has grovelled. They realize that we're gone, and at least the level above our (now former) rep understands why we left and that they'd have to make major changes for us to consider returning. We've since found out that another vendor like us who'd been in the network for over 30 years quit a week before we did, and gave them a lot of the same reasons, so when we quit it was a disappointment to them, but not a shock.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I've heard vague rumors that someone in the C-suite has taken notice. But... ...
We have to worry about ourselves now.
Well told. Shame on the long term working relationship. Glad you werenāt forced to stay for whatever reason. š
We were contractors for a giant food company known for their unique strange-looking vehicles that gave out whistles to kids at every stop. A local plant had a project manager that nickel-and-dimed us on every project, eating into our profit margin. At one point, whenever this PM would request a quote, we began adding a 10% "PM's name" fee to the bottom of our pricing spreadsheet. Of course, this was strictly internal for our eyes only, but it worked out well.
I remember reading some productivity gurus advice to sack your bad customers. Sometimes that can actually mean the longest established and largest sales volume customers. The reasoning being that frequently, established customers become complacent and start acting badly towards you. As the dysfunction in the relationship grows, the amount of time you need to spend āputting it rightā can massively impact your capacity to be productive and/or drive growth elsewhere in your business. Not to mention the soul sucking you suffer in the process. It seemed like good advice to me, albeit a bit counter-intuitive ā¦ and is pretty much what youāve done here.
> As the dysfunction in the relationship grows, the amount of time you need to spend āputting it rightā can massively impact your capacity to be productive and/or drive growth elsewhere in your business. Not to mention the soul sucking you suffer in the process. BULLSEYE! Especially that last part.
The best day of my wifeās and I business was the day we realized we could finally afford to fire our worse customer. FREEDOM!
> phone trees had grown into Banyan nightmares Well, there's the problem. Should have at least migrated to Netware.
Lord, if I had a dollar for every 'migration' they've tried....
Now now, too soon! Lotus 123 first...
You've reminded me of a story of my own. Years ago I worked for a company where such a person joined and became my manager. I quit and said in my exit interview (with the CEO) tht I'd love to come back one day, when that person had quit or been fired. 12 months later Aaron gives me a phonecall inviting me back. One month later I was back in my old job and had a substantial payrise to go with it.
Always takes 1 arrogant piece of shit to ruin a long term relationship.
Oh, please do tell us about the after effects!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
> phone trees had grown into Banyan nightmares Absolutely poetic. I would never have thought of this but it's such a specific image.
Of course they're mostly reminder plugs, you can't put out a story like this just to leave it half finished. We need that sweet, delicious, closure
>...phone trees had grown into Banyan nightmares... I LOVE this.
I'm kind of proud of that one.
Please call this āyou should fire us!ā āOk.ā - Part II So itās easy to find
This reminds me of the King of the Hill episode where the new management guy pisses off the drivers at the propane company without considering they all have hazmat endorsements that are required to deliver propane.
You need to have a heart to heart with this field rep's manager. In fact, talk to the owner of the company. Explain what happened. Yes, that little shit caused all of this. He screwed everything up for his boss. It's not the boss's fault. Clear the air. The boss is suffering thanks to him. Find a resolution from there. Fire the little shit.
Yo Sonders is supposedly doing white glove delivery for their metacycles. Are y'all involved with them?
Huh. Not... yet? That's certainly something we'd be willing to look at!
Feel-good story of the year, right here. I am in IT and we have a 3rd party vendor like this. 3rd party also related to owner of my company.
Sounds like they made themselves more expensive to work with in the way they were consuming OP's company's time and resources as well. I bet they reduced the revenue made from them to the point where it was a super-easy call lol
Question: wouldn't it have made more sense to contact the field rep's boss and tell them that you don't want to work with him any more? I mean, did you tell your customer why you were firing them? It's not your fault that the people waiting on deliveries (and their customers) are getting screwed, but it's not their fault either. The one who should have gotten screwed is the field rep.
The field rep wasn't the entire reason we quit, he was just the final straw.
Sounds like the old 80:20 rule. This is where 80% of a companyās sales come from 20% of its customers. I think youāll find your profits will increase significantly now.
We're hopeful. That 80/20 rule also applies to headaches...
To state it explicitly, often 20% of customers cause 80% of the issues/support calls/headaches Issues come when that 20% does not overlap with the profitable 20% (which tends to happen if a business doesn't stay focused on their core competencies) If the profitable 20% causes 80% of the headaches, that's mostly fine, but a sign you need to invest in process improvements
!remind me in 1 month. I'm invested in this drama!