What I Love About The Japanese

I have been very interested about Japan from when I was a kid.

My parents visited Japan many times when I was a teenager. They had bought for us, stationery items, electronic goods(calculator), clothes, which were not available at that time in India. This was in late 70s and we could hardly get any items from abroad, unless you traveled to those places. And I saw photos of my parents wearing Kimono and of cute Japanese children.

So, I had this fascination from childhood, but I didn’t visit Japan until recently.

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A humbling experIENCE

I learnt a valuable lesson from a Japanese man, who was a customer in the software company I worked for.

It was a result of the biggest goof up I ever did in my career.

I literally drove him crazy, because I missed or forgot a vital data point, that he had provided to us very early on in the Service Request(SR) . Ok, not literally, but I am sure he was tearing his hair off, in frustration!

I had read the SR, when it was assigned to me, but somehow I forgot or missed (not sure which one) this information. There was a lot of back and forth interactions with the customer in the SR, as translation had to be done from Japanese to English, so I missed it.

After weeks of this and interacting with Development, we were able to provide a software patch, for the exact same bug which the customer had mentioned early on in the SR. Lot of time was wasted trying to find what the issue was and ultimately it turned out to be the same bug that customer has already mentioned in the beginning of the SR.

I tried to talk to the customer directly, but since translation was required, the customer refused to talk.

It was only after the issue was resolved, I read the SR again, to figure out why the customer was being so difficult and realised the goof up from my side.

That the customer was right from the beginning. And, in fact, his behaviour was very much warranted and that he was well within his rights to give a low rating for the service provided in the SR. Also, if it was any other customer, the issue would have been far worse!

So, customer is ALWAYS right!

I believe it is because of their innate manners that this incident turned out to be better than it should have.

I truly appreciate and respect the Japanese customer, who stood his ground but in a polite manner.