One of my clients the other day was telling me how happy he was with my company, he specifically mentioned how great we are with fixing his problems promptly. I thought for a second that some people might think problems of any nature would be a negative, wear and tear etc. excluded because that sort of thing just happens.
Is there a term for having problems that you solve and become the hero for, even though it was initially a problem with your product?
This reminds me of a show where the Orkin guy was a lifelong friend of one of his customers. If he did the job right, they would never meet again right? (I know pests can come back). This lady treated the guy like he was a knight, always fixing the issue, even though it never really went away for good.
Maybe a better question would be “Does the feeling of many problems being resolved for a company outweigh the feeling of having no problems at all”?
I don’t know of a term for such a thing if there is one, but IMHO, I’d say that that certain products and industries are just known for breaking down, and others we more or less expect them to work for a certain amount of time without problems.
Take my Camry for example. It’s not even close to 100k miles yet, and I’ve had to have it in for numerous expensive repairs. It is indeed a lemon. Now, every time I’ve brought it in, they are fast and efficient and except for once, friendly, about the repair process. But I still hold it as a negative that there are problems at all. That’s because in the modern world, we expect a car like a Camry with a good reputation to go 100k miles without any expensive work needing to be done on it, or possibly even any minor work at all (other than routine maintenance, filters, fluid changes, and checks).
A great counter example would be Panasas which supplies our storage hardware and software for my work company. With computers, we expect lots of technical problems from time to time, and so having good, fast, friendly support is the best we can hope for. I mean, theoretically, wouldn’t it be nice if there were computer manufacturers and software manufacturers that made a product that worked like a car should in its first 100k miles? Alas, the technologies and problems and issues are different, and so, in certain fields we can’t reasonably expect products to “just work” 100% of the time for years and years. We rely and grade those products on the service we get from the manufacturers.
So I guess at the end of the day it really just comes down to calling such a company, “meeting standard expectations.” Some products have expectations that nothing will go wrong and you won’t have to call the manufacturer (when was the last time you called your light bulb manufacturer?) and other times (like computers and software) we have that expectation. Dell isn’t hated because their computers break or have troubles more than others inasmuch as they are hated for their terrible shitty customer service.
If your friend is buying shoddy lightbulbs but the company is nice and friendly and fast at replacing them, I too would raise an eyebrow and possibly say, “shouldn’t you just buy a lightbulb brand that doesn’t have that problem in the first place no matter HOW friendly they are?”
Resilience? I have worked for a number of software companies that got kudos because they addressed customer issues, bugs mostly, very quickly. It’s always better not to run into bugs, but since all software has bugs the companies that fix them quickly are often lauded.
My take: Any company, system, machine, industry, etc., is going to have some problems. Hopefully, not too many and not too serious. How such company, system, machine, industry, etc., deals with the occasional problem that does happen, tells me a lot.
A long time ago, in a city far away in another galaxy, I took my car to a certain dealership to repairs as needed. They generally did excellent work, which if the most important factor. But they did make the occasional screw-up (usually relatively minor). In each case, without exception, if I brought my car back for a fix to the fix, the maintenance manager took it in immediately, NO arguments or hassles, put it at the head of the line, and got it taken care of while I waited.
Given that their blunders were infrequent to begin with, I considered that a major PLUS for them.
As for the question the OP actually asked: Sorry, I don’t know a word for that. Just telling stories here.