Cultural Experience

I had a nice cultural experience last week when I had a 2 million card order going to Thailand. It was very stressful, frustrating, but a learning experience nevertheless

The customer sent me an order for the cards, but it wrong price so I emailed them to give me the correct price for the sea freighted shipment with a new order form. They gave me a new one but it was still wrong so I tell them to revise again. They told me they were pretty sure they had the right one. Okay, so this is a problem and now I have to sort this out. I check with my coworker who sent the quote and get the email from him since this is the way to find proof of this thing and come to a conclusion (this is what we Westerners do).

I then email the quote to all the people it concerned to show the correct price, standard fare I thought. Well the customer got mad since apparently I am not supposed to send price information to multiple people, fair enough (my bad here since this made them lose face).

Then it got real interesting with cultural stuff. I guess I am not supposed to “prove” the price to them (again they lose face by being told they are wrong). Even though they had previously agreed to the price and saw that we had proof of that, in Thailand this thing is still something that can be negotiated.

Well they refuse to agree to our price and say they want their boss and my boss to talk it over the next day when they meet at night. But they also want the shipment on time and it has to leave in the early morning, and it cannot leave without an invoice showing the price. This means I have to sort this thing out now! Well I end up calling my boss and we just give the customer the damn price and then let them negotiate the next day. Looking back it doesn't sound too stressful but the back and forth with my boss, coworkers, and the customer was a colossal pain in the ass.

Oh well, live and learn. I'll chalk this one up to experience.