It's Not My Problem
Introduction
One day I had a problem with the famous crowdfunding site Kickstarter. I had backed a project and never received the product sample I was promised. I complained directly to the site, and their response was shocking: the responsibility lay with the project owner, who may have used a shipping company that didn’t do the job properly. Really? That’s your excuse?
If you went to a restaurant one day and found the soup tasted terrible, would you accept the chef blaming farmers for a poor crop that year? Of course not. You’d say: if you respected your customers, you wouldn’t have cooked this poor-tasting harvest to begin with. A Japanese sushi chef goes to the fish market himself every day before dawn to buy the finest fish — he doesn’t wait for fishermen to bring it to him.
Who bears responsibility for failures in customer experience, and do third-party companies share that responsibility? In this article, I’ll answer that question.
Responsibility Falls Entirely on the Service or Product Provider
Let’s agree from the start that responsibility falls entirely on the service/product provider, no matter how many external parties are involved in delivering the service. The party to whom part of the work was outsourced does not bear the responsibility. The customer will blame you first — they’ll blame you if you chose a bad shipping company to deliver their goods, they’ll blame you if you outsourced to a bad call center that didn’t deliver good service, and they’ll blame you for poor event organization if a subcontractor failed at their tasks.
Let’s also think about employees. Companies are forced to contract with several external parties for cleaning, catering, recruitment, transportation, and so on. If any problem occurs with an employee, who do they complain to? They complain to the relevant department and may give it a low rating if there’s a feedback mechanism for external service providers.
If anything goes wrong and a customer expresses dissatisfaction, take responsibility courageously. Apologize and take corrective steps that ensure the failure isn’t repeated with other customers.
What to Do With Third-Party Vendors / Subcontractors
Start by safeguarding the customer’s interest from the outset — by searching for the best service providers. Imagine the vendors are suitors asking for your daughter’s hand. Treat your customers as if they were your daughter — look at every source that can give you information about the vendor, the companies they’ve worked with previously, and the opinions of their current customers before you sign with them. Many companies look very attractive on paper and in their pitches, but once the relationship begins, the opposite reality emerges.
A contract is the law between the contracting parties. If you must outsource part of the operations where there will be direct customer touchpoints in their journey with your service/product, you must first take great care in establishing a detailed contract that includes multiple service-level agreements about minimum acceptable levels of service and discounts on actual dues based on performance. That’s the legal side and one of the tools companies use to guarantee minimum service levels. If the vendor fails to meet the terms or minimum service levels, the contracting company may cancel the contract and seek other vendors.
Some giant companies focus on building strong relationships with the companies they outsource work to. They meet with them regularly, and in some cases there’s even employee rotation between the two companies, all aimed at strengthening the relationship. As important as contracts are for ensuring service quality, the relationship plays an even larger role — because humans are emotional beings, no matter how rational they claim to be.
Manage your customers’ expectations through transparency. If it’s hard for you to contract with the best service providers due to cost, or because you’re an entrepreneur just starting out, don’t be shy about being honest with your customers instead of giving them empty promises.
The final option, which only the giants can achieve, is delivering the service from A to Z by acquiring third-party companies. That’s what a company like Toyota did. Or by setting up entities that perform the task themselves — several dairy companies, for example, built their own distribution fleets instead of relying on logistics companies. The latest news related to this tactic is Amazon’s announcement of its intent to start its own shipping company, which immediately caused several shipping companies to lose millions in market value.
What If the Fault Is the Customer’s?
In some cases the customer isn’t right, and their complaint about a product may be due to misuse. But even when the customer misuses something, the responsibility falls on the service/product provider to educate them. Reminder: most coffee chains began writing “this beverage is very hot” on their cups after a woman filed a lawsuit and won.
In very rare cases, the customer is treated positively even when the fault is entirely theirs. This is embodied in the famous story of a woman returning car tires to Nordstrom — which doesn’t even sell car tires in its stores.
What If the Fault Is the Service Owner’s?
Sometimes the problem is internal and has nothing to do with external contractors. The defect is internal, from the service owner — possibly a specific person or a department responsible for the service. This “not my problem” mindset shows up when an immature service is launched without well-defined procedures, just for the sake of claiming a win or because of significant launch delays — and the victim is the customer, who has no part in the maturity level of the service owner in their responsibility to launch ready, mature services that deliver a smooth, easy experience to beneficiaries. That’s why organizations should have policies and procedures around service readiness to ensure that what’s launched won’t disappoint customers or frontline employees who absorb all the blame and anger from customers when the service isn’t ready.
A Case Study
A while back I watched a video of an investor denying responsibility on behalf of his company, which manufactures bottled water. He said that if retail outlets or customers don’t store his product correctly, he isn’t responsible for changes in its specifications — and he said it in a provocative way. The clip might look fair to a naive customer, but my view was different because I asked myself: has his company educated retailers and customers about proper storage of his product? If the answer is yes, has his company stopped supplying outlets that didn’t comply with storage instructions and that customers had complained about? Perhaps the reader is starting to change their view now. If the owner had spoken about his efforts and steps to ensure his product’s safety in a way befitting his customers, it would have served him better.
In Closing
There’s no doubt that controlling the quality of third-party companies is a difficult task — but not impossible, especially for customer-centric companies that won’t accept anything less than the highest level of service and the best possible experience for their customers. As for the “not my problem” crowd that keeps blaming its vendors and partners, they won’t last long in the market unless they reverse this behavior.
One may fail many times, but he isn’t considered a failure until he begins to blame others. — John Burroughs
I close my article with the famous saying of the Muslim caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab, may God be pleased with him: “Were a mule to stumble in Iraq, I would think God would ask me about it.”
For related work, see Service Blueprint and Moments That Matter.
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