He is coming again!
14 October 2016
Vahe Hanamirian
Global Accounts and Marketing Director
Even minor mistakes in the sales process can cause the customer a great deal of annoyance. Well, these were annoying at the time but a funny story years later...
In the 1990s, Kordsa had a considerable amount of business making material for covering conveyor belts. In those days, conveyor belt production in Europe was at its peak and deliveries were quite intense. Trucks from our factory went out to customers all over Europe each week. We had customers in Yugoslavia, Italy, Denmark, France, and the UK.
Many of our customers in the UK had production sites around the Manchester area but head offices in London.
We had one such customer, with a head office building in the middle of a big, beautiful, typical English garden. To imagine it, let us think of Hyde Park or St. James’s Park. To visit them was a joy, as we would spend time in London and sit in this verdant park after the negotiations.
Like many others, their factory was near Manchester, so there were two different addresses on the shipment documents. The invoice address was the one in London and the shipment address near Manchester. Although the documents were prepared correctly, the driver made a mistake. Instead of driving to the factory, he took the big container truck to the head office. First driving into London, he then began driving over the green grass of the beautiful park area. We got a written complaint from the lady in charge of buying, because the truck had destroyed much of the garden. She was really annoyed, for understandable reasons.
We sent an official reply, but wanted to calm her down by talking to her personally on the phone and decided to call her. We were apologizing and promising that this would not happen again.
The lady’s office must have had a window facing the park area and suddenly she stopped talking. We just heard:
Oh my god! There he is, coming again!
We felt like we were in a ‘Terminator’ movie. A big truck driving at full speed towards the building, destroying all the nature on the way