We've Been Experiencing Delays

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"Over the last few days, Twitter has been experiencing intermittent delivery delays. We updated the status blog but were fairly quiet here on our company blog because we only knew the symptom, not the problem."

"We have an overbooked situation" (heard at the USAir boarding gate recently).

What drives me crazy about these well-crafted statements is their passive nature. The likes of "We're experiencing delays…" and "We have a situation…" try to impart a sense of "Hey, we're victims too…we have no responsibility for what's wrong."

Wouldn't it be great to just tell clients "We've been experiencing delays," or "We have a nail-through-a-pipe situation" and then act like we're going above and beyond the call of duty to fix it?

Doesn't seem to work in our business. No offense to Twitter or USAir, but we remodelers have a much more intimate relationship with our clients, one built on trust. The slightest bit of B.S., from us to them, will cause that trust to wane.

Twitter and USAir, if they pull crap like that too often, will just slowly lose customers. We, on the other hand, will have a potential "client from hell" to deal with for months.

I think a large percentage of "clients from hell" are created by contractors who don't own-up to their mistakes promptly, honestly, and without excuses.

The contractors who don't take responsibility for their mistakes, their vendors, their subcontractors, and the products they specify are usually the ones complaining about one "client from hell" after another.

Greg Antonioli is the president of Out of the Woods Construction & Cabinetry, a Massachusetts design/build firm that is committed to open-book management, a team-driven approach to decision-making, and a great relationship with homeowner clients. He blogs for REMODELING every Monday.

 
 

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About the Blogger

Greg Antonioli

thumbnail image Greg Antonioli founded Out of the Woods Construction and Cabinetry Inc. in 1992. With more than $3 million in revenues in 2009, Out of the Woods is a design/build firm that does strictly residential remodeling, historically in the Boston suburbs and increasingly in the city. The company has 13 employees (eight in the field, five in the office), practices open-book management, and enjoys a company-wide bonus program. Greg is a long-time member of Remodelers Advantage Roundtables, president of the Eastern Massachusetts NARI chapter, and a Sandler Sales trainee. He is also an avid reader of business books and periodicals, a regular magazine contributor, and (some have said) a twisted thinker. Greg believes that his company’s #1 obligation is to its construction clients. He believes that company time and resources spent on sales is time that should be spent serving construction clients, therefore sales and design efforts must be very efficient. One of every three of the prospects with whom Greg meets becomes a design client, and 100% of those design clients convert to construction clients. Greg is a native of California’s Silicon Valley area and a graduate of Santa Clara University. He and his wife have three daughters and live in Acton, Mass.