Collaboration is more important than having all the answers
- Claire Baker
- Nov 2
- 2 min read
Everyone screws up. Excellence shows up in how you respond when things don’t go to plan.
A client screwed up recently.
The kind of thing that happens all the time: someone checked the wrong box and hit “submit” too soon.
Except this wasn’t like sending an email with a typo or putting a calendar event on the wrong Tuesday. There was money involved. It was a small boo-boo with big consequences.
💩 happens.
They contacted the vendor right away to fix it.
The vendor did some stuff, hit some buttons, and made it all better. On screen, anyway.
“So it’s all fixed now?” the client asked. “There’s nothing else we need to do? The bank won’t do the thing we’re trying to avoid?”
“All fixed. Can I help you with anything else today?”
Except it wasn’t all fixed. Three to five business days later, the thing they were trying to avoid happened.
When they came back to the vendor to fix it, the vendor’s response was basically, “You messed up. Not our problem.”
But if the vendor had only admitted that they didn’t know, the client would have known there was more work to be done. They could have called the bank. They could have prepared messaging for those affected.
People and companies who never admit fault or ignorance don’t inspire confidence. In this situation, the right support response would have been, “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out together.”
In this case, the vendor’s false confidence left the client to fall on their face.
And all trust was lost.
A couple of years ago I had a similar experience with a different vendor that went completely differently.
We’d messed up. Something went wrong, and we reached out to Support for help.
Except the system didn’t behave as expected. More than once. It took weeks to clean up. The whole thing could have been a nightmare.
Except instead of saying, “Not our fault” and backing away, this vendor took responsibility for the parts of their product that weren’t working right.
The Support person checked in with her team lead daily to make sure the ticket was prioritized. She kept me updated, even when there was no progress. As deadlines passed, she worked with me to figure out workarounds and stopgaps. She stayed in touch until it was fixed.
I still wonder how she's doing these days.
Sure, it was a disaster. But it was a MITIGATED disaster. And by the end, they'd turned a bad experience into a great one.
I won’t say who the first vendor was, but the second was Rippling. By admitting they weren't perfect, we were able to work together toward a solution. By working together, we became allies.
By the end, they hadn't just earned a five-star review but a devoted Rippling advocate for life.
A culture of perfectionism undermines trust. Nobody’s perfect.
If you stop worrying about how you’ll get in trouble, you can find opportunities in the worst customer experiences.
Dealing with a lot of payroll issues? We can help.