Being Right Has Never Once Helped Me

Two drivers argue at a four-way stop about who had the right of way. Both can recite the rule correctly. The bumper is still bent.

A customer called last week furious about a data sync that failed because of a change on their vendor's side, not ours. I had the logs open. I could have walked him through it in about four minutes and been completely, provably right.

I didn't. I've tried that before, more times than I'd like to admit, and it has never once worked. Not "rarely" — never. The customer doesn't hear the explanation as information, they hear it as me telling them their anger is misplaced, which is a worse thing to hear than "we're sorry, let's fix it" no matter how accurate it is. I ran a business incubator for four years and then did this at the state level for thousands of companies, and I watched the same pattern from the outside long before I recognized it from the inside — the business that's technically correct and still loses the customer. I'd been half-learning this for years before I ever heard the phrase for it: you cannot win an argument. Even when you win it, you've lost.

So on the call I apologized for the experience, said we'd help them sort it with the vendor, and left the cause out entirely. It landed fine. He calmed down. We fixed it.

What I'm not sure about is what I gave up by doing that. If this vendor keeps breaking things and I never say so, does the customer keep blaming us for a pattern that isn't ours? Does my own team start to think it's our bug because nobody ever said otherwise? I don't have a clean answer. I default to trusting people, which means I don't always leave myself a record when I need one — that's the same blind spot showing up in a different room.

I know the logic is sound. I use it and I still catch myself starting a sentence with "actually" more than I'd like.

If you're in customer success — do you ever tell them whose fault it actually was, or does that only ever make it worse for you too?