Outage, service credits and lost confidence
You are BRM for a 3PL provider's largest customer, a grocery retailer. In the pre-Christmas peak, the track-and-trace service failed for six hours. Deliveries were delayed and the retailer's own customer service took 4,000 calls. The contract includes service credits, and the retailer has submitted a claim for £140k. Root cause was a middleware change deployed outside the change window agreed with the retailer, although the change was low-risk and well tested. Before this, the relationship was strong: satisfaction was 4.5 out of 5 and the account had been renewed for three years. The retailer's operations director has asked for a 'senior review' and says she has lost confidence in IT's change discipline. Your own service delivery manager wants to focus the review on the technical root cause.
1. What should the senior review cover, and who should be in the room?
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The senior review should be about the relationship and the control failure, not a technical post-mortem. The technical root cause is already known and can be covered in ten minutes.
- Who: the retailer's operations director and her service manager; your service delivery manager, the change manager, and the account director. You chair or co-chair with the account director.
- Content: the impact in the retailer's terms (4,000 calls, delayed deliveries), an unambiguous acknowledgement that the change was deployed outside the agreed window, what happens to the service credits, and what changes.
- Actions with dates: a joint change calendar, a notification threshold for changes affecting the retailer, and a named escalation contact on both sides.
- Do not let the service delivery manager lead with middleware. It answers a question the customer did not ask and signals that the internal process matters more than her customers did.
2. The customer says she has lost confidence. What actually rebuilds trust here, and what would undermine it?
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Trust is rebuilt by consistent evidence, not by assurance or discounting.
- Rebuilds: honouring the agreed change calendar without exception for a quarter; inviting the retailer into change scheduling rather than notifying after the fact; reporting near-misses as well as failures; doing what was said by the date it was said.
- Undermines: offering a credit or a discount as a substitute for changing the process; a second change outside the window, however low-risk; over-promising a technical fix that has not been proven; a review that produces a document but no visible behaviour change.
The £140k claim should be handled contractually and promptly, and then separated from the trust conversation. If the customer believes the credit was given to buy silence, the relationship is worse than before the review.
3. What should change in how changes affecting this customer are managed, and how do you agree it with her?
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Propose a joint change protocol rather than an internal fix announced to the customer.
- A shared change calendar with the retailer's peak periods marked and agreed blackout dates.
- A notification threshold: any change touching the track-and-trace path, regardless of internal risk rating, is notified in advance with a rollback plan.
- A joint pre-change check for high-impact changes, with the retailer's service manager confirming the window.
- A retrospective at 90 days, reviewing adherence, not intentions.
Agree it in the review, with the operations director's sign-off, so she owns part of the protocol. A unilateral tightening of internal process may satisfy your change manager but will not restore her confidence, because she was not in the room when it was decided.