Earlier this week we sent a note to a vendor letting them know that we would not be using their product or reselling it to our customers. We had been using the product in our own network as part of an evaluation before we would consider selling the product to our clients. That's a standard practice for us so that we can avoid using our clients as test cases. In this case we were reminded why we put that practice in place. If the product isn't going to work as designed then the time and money wasted needs to be ours, not the client's. In this case that certainly seemed to be true. No matter what we did we simply could not get the product to live up to its marketing hype. This was after several of our peers had recommended the product. I'm not doubting that it works great for them, but it certainly didn't for us. After having to send the product back to the manufacturer twice for repairs and about 6+ months of trying to get things working we finally threw in the towel and said "we've spent enough time on this and we're never going to be able to recommend this product to a client".
We expected a sales rep to call us back and try to talk us out of the decision. Maybe a sales manager. I did not expect the CEO to both call and send an email in an all out attempt to make things right. In the email he says:
"My father always told me that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. My goal with you is that regardless where you will take your business, I want to make sure I have done everything to make you feel good and make it right. This is how I would want to be treated. First of all I would like to personally apologize to you on the bad experience you have had with <snip>. This is very distressing to me. I am also owner of a VAR here in <snip> and I know what it is like to have a vendor let me down. While we have over <snip> happy end users throughout the country, the fact that we have you as an unhappy customer is not acceptable to me and our company. <snip> was built by VARs and is owned by VARs. I would like to at least make you feel good at the end of day knowing that <snip> went out of its way to make you whole."
The CEO goes on to provide an offer to ship us a new unit, provide free service for a year and send out an engineer to make sure the product is working as advertised. We're not sure if we will take him up on the offer or just cut our losses and move on, but he succeeded in turning this from a bad experience in our minds to one where we'll have a different story to tell when his product name comes up in discussions with other VAR's.
What would you have done in his situation? Would the results have been the same?
