Silence may be golden, but it’s terrible customer service.
Somebody owed us money for a project we performed in October and November 2025. They needed x-rays – instantaneous, naturally – to validate a project for a large, anonymous commercial spaceflight company with a fondness for overwrought usage of the letter X. Something about qualifying a Cu-Ag braze alloy sandwiched between an alumina inner cylinder and a Kovar outer cylinder. Danger lurks within. Our job: find it.
We did the job. Nine separate jobs, actually; many of them same-day turnarounds. Data were furnished very fast, enabling process upgrades so egos, er, X-rockets could fly. Just doing our part.
It’s June 2026, and we’re still awaiting full payment for services rendered eight and a half months ago. Curiously, the customer neglected mentioning their desire for net 270 terms. When we email them to seek payment status, with the subject line emphasizing the eighth request, the response is dead silence. Perhaps their accounting department wishes we’d just go away; accounts payable logic says that if they don’t answer, the issue will spontaneously resolve itself into a non-issue, a question read only by intelligent life on distant galaxies. Maintain silence, and all will be well. Herewith a striking lesson illustrating why people should study the humanities in addition to accountancy.
Another day, another example. A customer with flying probe systems identical to ours in every way except the knowledge of its operators needs our assistance. Help is freely given. Upon completion of program debug, we transfer the finished program to the customer via FTP. The customer insists that they do the program installation themselves; in fact, their test engineer will only communicate with our test engineer by means of SMS. Something about a lack of confidence in English language proficiency.
We send them the completed, fully-debugged program. Weeks go by in silence. Follow-up emails to confirm all is well go unanswered. The presumption of tranquility on our end lingers, until the SMS pleas burst forth like incoming rockets, requesting written assistance with program installation. Written assistance. Cascading, line-downish requests, all via SMS, all the same. We respond, in writing, to every request. Requests by us for Teams meetings and remote login to their system to troubleshoot go into thin air.
Increasingly anxious SMS requests multiply. Each claims nothing is working, that they are unable to load and run our programs. A small remnant is surrounding, surviving on boiled potatoes and grit, seeking air support. They have a queue of finished production boards to test, but are unable to test them. Management is noticing. Our engineers offer to log in and help, but their technicians refuse to enable remote access to verify the problem in real time. Only written SMS communications are permitted. The excuse, once again, is limited English proficiency. Each message peels the skin of subterfuge off a bit more, and the clouds part; experience-based suspicion builds. Poor understanding of the elementary functions of the flying probe test system is manifestly apparent. Put plainly, these guys didn’t know what they were doing.
But they’re hiding behind text messages, thinking we can’t unmask them.
Communication breakdowns, delayed responses and unmet expectations can create costly obstacles long before technical issues become the real problem.
It’s not every day that my own engineers ask me to charge a customer for our time, but that’s exactly what happened here. Frustrated, indignant, our folks drew the line. The fact that the customer’s technicians were either untrained, poor learners or both was not, fundamentally, our problem. So, if by circumstance, and the need to move production testing forward, we resorted to remedial training, we should get paid. That’s engineering logic. I’m good with that. So, respecting my team’s judgment, we asked to be paid.
Pandemonium.
Crucially, the customer’s test engineering manager was not good with that. In a well-aimed killjoy move designed to ruin Friday afternoon tranquility, we received an email detailing how uncooperative and unsupportive our company had been to his company. As relayed to him (in person!) by his trusted employees. He lamented that our programs would not work on his machines (never mind that they ran flawlessly on ours). He insinuated we were gaining a poor reputation among the technicians at his facility (who, it might be noted, were accomplished corporate infighters). To make matters worse, asking for payment for hours spent training fanned the flames. Contract manufacturing managers take a dim view of surcharges. Moreover, this manager had found another company which, he claimed, could generate programs that did run on his machines with little or no difficulty. In 750 words, he expressed one word: J’accuse!
Nothing prompts a lightning response faster than an injustice broadcast through the megaphone of a large corporation. A phone conference was arranged within hours. Three on our side; the test engineering manager, alone, on his side. No technicians present. The test engineering manager droned on about how difficult we were to work with, as his employees relayed to him. We tried defending ourselves, but it was one of those monologues where he just kept talking, right over our objections. He had his script and wasn’t deviating from it. At a certain point, experience dictates you remain silent and let the customer delight in himself, degrading content and context in the process. Just let him finish. We take notes.
Upon completion, we ignored his lengthy indictment and asked the Great Man if we might assist, and in what form. He responded that we could help by guiding his technicians step by step through the program installation process. Naturally, we replied that we’d be glad to do so; in fact, serendipitously, we’d been doing so all along. (His valued team members had neglected to inform him about that. Knowledge is power. So is withholding it.) He noted that his customer intended for him to produce 60 flying probe programs this year, and that if we could successfully guide his people through this first rough patch, good things would follow. So, we did. Our lead engineer spent seven hours online with the customer’s test technician, guiding him/her via SMS (again!) through the installation process, step by excruciating step. Until finished. And it worked: boards got tested. After the seventh hour, our engineer rested. Amen.
Two weeks later, I followed up again. I wanted to know the status of the much-anticipated 60-part numbers. Shockingly, there was no response to my email.
I tried a second time two weeks after that and, again, a month after that. Same result one month later. Radio silence.
My scam antenna was acquiring strong signals. On the one hand, there is no second, independent source for the exact kind of flying-probe programs this customer needs that would be plug-and-play on his machines. Other than his own internal resources, coming from another site, we represented his only drop-in solution. Other options require elaborate conversion steps. Given the extended silence, we began to get the feeling of having been played.
As of the date of this writing, in June 2026, we’re still waiting.
Another customer, an OEM, needed AXI (automatic x-ray inspection) services. They design very large boards, the kind that don’t fit in many AXI systems, including their EMS provider’s AXI system. The latter informed their customer of this inability to provide in-house inspection services on a large backplane. So, both OEM and EMS company, separately, called us. Could we help, stat? Except they used the tired euphemism “support” as in “We need you to support this requirement.” Like Atlas, holding up the world. All systems go.
Until they got the quote.
In what had to be a new first in creativity, the OEM purchasing manager lectured us in an email that our AXI program pricing was unacceptably high because our programming engineering rates matched those of elite programmers and software engineers, the kind involved in AI development. He looked this up on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Surely the comparison, and his criticism, was on target. He was, after all, a Supply Chain Professional, therefore unimpeachably correct.
Well, no.
Setting aside the relativizing insult to our programming skills, and setting aside the purchasing manager’s purely abstract understanding of the AXI process, what remains is a unique board. It will fit in exactly one machine within a 50-mile radius of my desk. Coincidentally, that one machine resides 40 feet from my office. So, their one solution remains here, and no amount of statistical wizardry by the BLS or APICS or IEEE or GEA or SMTA or anybody else will alter that reality.
So: Mr. Know-It-All OEM Purchasing Manager, make my day.
Two months later, we are still awaiting a purchase order. The latest excuse is that management is still reviewing. Some people have a unique sense of urgency. Which is fine.
They still have a problem. We still have the only solution (cue sinister Spaghetti Western gunfighter music).
Between declaration of problem and its resolution, three months (and counting) have elapsed. Like the Voyager spacecraft exiting the solar system, the gap increases daily, filled mostly with silence. Problem-solving with the velocity of a banana slug.
These people and their conspiratorial, bureaucratic little minds really exist. They share in the miscalculation of gross national product.
Speaking of the silence of unanswered prayers and unresolved problems, another EMS customer was forced to use our services by its OEM. In this case, we were favorably disposed to the use of force.
The complexity and use of the PCBA in question (failure is not an option) dictated a three-fer: every board in the run would be tested using flying probe, inspected at every solder joint with AXI, and manually x-rayed in certain critical areas by a high-end 2D/2.5D x-ray system. Upon completion of testing, each thrice-tested board is accompanied by its weight in data. Which nobody reads.
Setting up three programs (yes, even manual x-ray needs a program to speed repetitive steps) takes time. More than the one-day notice the EMS gave us. For the eighteenth time, we were forced to explain to our slow learner that we are not a vending machine: you don’t insert a Susan B. Anthony dollar and out pops a tested board. Like magic.
Perhaps this failure to inform us until the eleventh and three-quarter hour had something to do with their never intending to use us in the first place, until the OEM laid down the law. So, they scrambled. Which they’ve been doing a lot because the board was a handful, requiring all hands-on deck at the assembly site and making the OEM the program manager, practically speaking. Whatever the reason, they were late. One week late. A case of rapidly diminishing lead time (The testing guys are good sports; they’ll make up the difference, right?) But between declaration of intent and delivery of boards, our requests for status went unanswered. Until the board showed up, just in time to ruin somebody’s three-day holiday weekend. But now the shoe was on the other foot, and they demanded up-to-the-minute status reports.
In business, like marriages, communication is essential. Silence suggests bad things are happening. Prolonged silence confirms it.
We could tell you some of the details, but proprietary information and consequent NDAs require that we remain silent.
Robert Boguski is president of Datest Corp. (datest.com); This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. His column runs bimonthly.
