The Customer Blamed Our Tools — Turns Out It Was His Coolant
I got the call on a Tuesday afternoon. Tom from purchasing — I could tell by his voice he was already fed up. “These new gun drills you sent us are garbage,” he said. “We’re barely getting thirty holes per tool. The old ones did sixty easy. I want a refund.” Now, I’ve been around gun drills long enough to know that when someone blames the tool first, the problem is usually somewhere else. A gun drill is a simple thing — a carbide tip brazed to a steel tube with a coolant hole running through the center. When it fails, it’s almost always because something in the system made it fail. But you don’t say that to a customer on the first call. You listen, you apologize, and you offer to come take a look. The customer is never wrong in the first conversation. They’re just describing a symptom. ...