The Unreasonable Customer - Responding to 3 or more Customer Concerns a Day

S

s-bell

#1
Having recently changed companies I am finding myself in a position of dealing with a difficult customer. I'm looking for some advise from the cove in how to approach this issue.

We currently supply into two separate docks at our customer, in one dock we recieve perhaps one or two customer concerns a month, in this area the customer investigates a concern before raising the paperwork against us as a supplier.

The other dock however we recieve 60+ concerns a month! Of these perhaps only 10 will contribute towards our ppm score, the others are minor issues (pads out of position - discovered after point of fit). Whilst we dispute these issues, the paperwork is raised and official 8D responses are required. This means that as a company we need to respond to at least 3 - 4 customer concerns a day.

Our customer is obviously working to two different levels but as a company all we want to do is improve. The philosophy for continuous improvement is a step by step approach but with the number of concerns being raised we are finding ourselves responding more as a paperwork exercise than actually closing out concerns which we want to do with full preventative and corrective actions. Our customer is unrelenting and refuses to not raise paperwork on minor issues that do not cause any lineside issues. :bonk:

To make things even worse, the product we are supplying is from processes subcontracted to us by the customer. We have master samples issued and signed by the customer, however our customer now refuses to accept that this standard still applies. Before Christmas we were improving our performance, however following Christmas, our customer has changes the standards again.

The parts we supply are in a far better condition than the initial master samples approved by our customer but still we get hit for everything. We have recently been told that the concerns not on our PPM will be raised to PPM level in September.

As a company we know where our issues lie and are working to put them right, however the time spent responding and discussing the minor non important issues is ending up the same as investigating what we and our customer see as key issues. How can a customer expect a full corrective / preventative action on 60+ concerns raised a month when a absolute maximum of 10 would be raised by any other customer I have dealt with.

Woah, waffled on a bit there, if anyone has any advise on how to approach this it would be appreciated (by the way we only receive 1 month to reply to concerns before we are demerited as a supplier).
 
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J

Jonell

#2
s-bell said:
We have master samples issued and signed by the customer, however our customer now refuses to accept that this standard still applies. Before Christmas we were improving our performance, however following Christmas, our customer has changes the standards again.
Hello,

I've run into a similar situations with a customer of ours. Our procedure is that anytime that the customer makes a change to the requirements of a part, then it is automatically sent back through the quoting process, no matter how small the change is. Keep in mind that anytime that a customer wants to make a change, then he is in effect asking to change the contract that was originally agreed upon.

Jonell
 

SteelMaiden

Super Moderator
Super Moderator
#3
We have gone through this type of thing also. And yes, you can requote for changes. Or, as we did to some of these types of customers, no-quote. If we lost their business, it wasn't going to kill us because of the money we were spending on claims and all the "overhead" associated with our investigations, negotiations, etc. If they remained customers, they typically "played nice" after they found out we were unafraid of their threats.
 
D

D.Scott

#4
I agree with Jonell - all changes are subject to contract review.

I am a bit lost on what you are saying about concerns. Surely these 60 per month can't be all different concerns. There must be a common concern - a common root cause. If there were 60 different concerns every month, I would worry that the process had no stability at all. If the customer is complaining about the same thing all the time, why not fix it? Pareto the concerns and see what common root cause you can come up with and start correcting the problem. The fact that you consider the problems minor is irrelevent. Determine if the concern is VALID. If it is, you owe it to the customer to get it fixed. On the other hand, if the concerns are not valid, maybe it's time to sit down with the customer and discuss customer perception. If it is just the dock personnel who are being unreasonable, maybe their management can help. Personally, I would look to my own process to see why I had so many concerns and I would sure want to know why our corrective action wasn't effective.

Dave
 
S

s-bell

#5
D.Scott said:
. Surely these 60 per month can't be all different concerns. There must be a common concern.
Dave
Unfortunately the concerns we get are varied, we already do a lot of visual reporting of concerns including Pareto and are working towards corrective actions on the main concerns. Our processes are predominantly manual and this is the root cause of a lot of the issues. I think I mentioned in the first post that the jobs we have the biggest issues with were transfered to us from our customer (jigs, equipment etc). This would appear to have been a badly managed transfer taken for commercial reasons only. Our customer "lied" to us when the equipment was transfered about secondary operations and also the faults within the process. We were then swamped with non-con's resulting in us setting up the secondary ops our customer had originally hidden from us when quoting for the business (before my time with the company). We've looked at the commercial contract side of things and again this was poor during the transfer, however approaching the buyer may be a good move for us if we explain the predicament over the number of concerns being raised.

We are looking to improve with the customer but one of my other points was that the customer just isn't helping us by raising concerns for absolutely everything found. This means that as a quality department we are having to complete 60+ 8D's per month, with just myself and one other looking after these it's not really feasible to perform a sound root cause analysis and define the corrective action. As I say maybe 10 of these are real concerns that cause the customer issues, the other are minor and whilst we understand they are problems, we're not been given the chance to sort out the majors without being hammered in our supplier rating. By the way, our montly ppm into the customer is 400 or less, including all minor concerns, Valid and not Valid to standards.

We've also tried the management approach but we've hid a brick wall here as well. Maybe I'm banging my head against a brick wall but I cannot see an approach that will allow us the breathing space from concerns to spend the time correcting the issues. I know what we have to do I am just stumped for an approach with the customer to achieve the improvements. Don't want to sound too negative in my replies I sure am glad of any help at the moment and don't want to put others off in their posts :thanx: .
 

RoxaneB

Super Moderator
Super Moderator
#6
Do you pay out financially for these complaints? One thing that we noticed was we had a customer who repeatedly filed complaints and our company immediately issued the credit before an analysis could be conducted. We quickly changed that process upon determining that the analysis was finding the complaints to be invalid (i.e., no proof to indicate that the customer was right).

We have stopped the process of paying out immediately and the customer has since stopped complaining.

If your customer is getting money back with all of these complaints, start determining if they are truly valid complaints. If it's not valid, don't waste your time or money...and then you can focus on the big ones.

The option is to inform your customer about a change in your customer complaint process. Due to production priorities, your time will be limited to focus only on complaints that meet a certain criteria (pick the criteria that will highlight the big complaints you mentioned). All other complaints will be processed, but not immediately. And no credits will be issued until a complaint is resolved.
 
S

s-bell

#7
RCBeyette said:
Do you pay out financially for these complaints?
We pay approx $150 CAD equivalent in GBP £ for each concern raised. I'll check into the billing system and get back to you. Thanks. :thanx:
 
J

Jay Sturgeon

#8
Similar Issues

:mad: I have a customer doing the same type of thing. Here's the kicker, to don't bill us, they just take it out of the check when they send it. Then you have to move the world to get your money back.

And they ask me why I drink......... :bonk:
 
S

s-bell

#9
We're billed at the end of each month for the concerns we receive, we apparently do dispute some of the costs but it looks as though the quantity paid remains pretty constant as everytime we close an issue a new one is developed.

Customers, can't live with them, can't do business without them. :truce:

I'm treading the fine line between working my butt off to keep the customer happy with their paperwork and performing an admin role which I'm not happy with, or persuading my managers to take the hit on failed responses to concerns and taking the time to permanently correct the problem. At the moment I'm bordering on the latter but don't understand the full consequences for the company at this moment.

I live and breath for quality (a sad fact), it's customers like this that stop us as a company helping them and us improve. I just can't seem to get through to them on any level. My worry is that once we correct the problems they'll only develop new ones.


Rock - Me - Hardplace
 

Cari Spears

Super Moderator
Staff member
Super Moderator
#10
Man-oh-man!! Can I ask what percentage of your business is this customer? And, how big are they? Tier one? B3?

I hadn't even thought about the charge backs - I forgot all about that, having been out of the automotive industry for a few years. I feel the same way now as when I made the conscious decision to target non-automotive companies in search of employment.

It's not that we don't have issues with customers on occasion - and we do jump through hoops for some - but there isn't one customer that, on there own, could impact revenue enough to put up with what you're describing.
 
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