When We Fail Our Customers

Recently, I was reminded of how airplanes crash.  It's never one thing - pilot error, or malfunctioning equipment.  It's the circumstances where 7-8 little things combine in a terribly unfortunate way, to produce a result that is unrecoverable.  It may be triggered by a single system failure or cockpit decision, but inevitably the findings of the NTSB's of the world are a series of issues which when combined produce the crash result.

I've recently been involved in a customer deployment that also resulted in a crash, and as much as it would be easy to point the (unproductive) finger of blame in one direction, this situation like an airplane crash was the result of a series of events. (Side note here - blame is wholly unproductive 100% of the time as the act of looking for a scapegoat, destroys the learning opportunity to see what might have been done differently. Educated minds learn from our mistakes and adapt, small minds blame.)

In this case, I'll keep the client detail confidential, suffice it to say that they were looking for something to make their world a little easier to work in.  As someone involved in a consultancy that offers services to do exactly that, I was part of a team engaged to assist.  The end result was that our efforts didn't work.  Responsibility for the failure sits in a few places - us, and the customer - but it's really the customer that pays the price for the failure as they still have their core issue, and the engagement of our team cost them time.  We lost some revenues, but that's a drop in the bucket.

So what 'systems' or conditions contributed to this failure..?  I think I can sum it up as follows:

• They weren't all on the same wavelength on the nature of the issue they had
• We didn't acknowledge that
• They specifically didn't want some kinds of solutions
• We ignored that, and went ahead anyway as we perceived that they had problems in those areas
• The nature of our solution put some of their people at risk - in their eyes
• We didn't address that in a timely fashion
• They elected not to own the customization they contributed to, for the chosen solution
• We didn't press them to do that, content instead that it was the right thing to do

We weren't able to create value for them, and so they moved on.  It was probably the right decision for them.

I know we're feeling chastened, and displeased with the end result and our desire is to blame, or at least defend the actions taken.  Hindsight as they say is 20/20 though and the more interesting discussion is what to do differently next time.

Prior to 'solutioning', we need to get to the root of the issues better.  Understand the stakes of the key individuals involved and talk about what exactly constitutes success for each party.  We need to understand the roles each of their individuals will have in determining success, and how they influence one another.  We failed this customer by not doing our own jobs well.  Next time, we'll do better.