Dealing with Mr Chang from 台北 Taipei

I need to get this off my chest as I have had to deal with a difficult situation at work with a client who has poor social skills. As much as I am trying my best to help him, well I think there's a lesson to be learnt from this episode and I would love to share some pearls of wisdom here on my blog. So I have this client in Taiwan, let's call him Mr Chang (not his real name) from Taipei. He is an investment advisor based in Taipei, serving rich clients in Taiwan. As mentioned before, I do deal with the Taiwanese markets and he is one of my clients in Taiwan. He needed a investment platform to access European bonds and so I recommended a platform that my company works with a lot. Let's call this platform INV (obviously not their real name), which are the first three letters of the word "invest". The problem with Mr Chang is that he doesn't speak much English and I often have to function as his translator when he is dealing with the staff at INV which I don't mind at all, since Mr Chang is investing a lot of his clients' money in my company's products through INV's platform.

So let's go back about a month, back to December when INV made a minor error - one of Mr Chang's clients made an investment and after that latest trade was processed, a clerk at INV had to update their account balance. The clerk made a typo, s/he placed the decimal point in the wrong place, so imagine if you expected to see $5,000,000 in your account and you see only $500,000 in your account - yeah, Mr Chang's client spotted the error, they both made a huge fuss and of course, INV rectified the mistake at once and offered groveling apologies. These systems are updated by humans each time a trade is placed, not everything is automated and if you're reliant on a human being entering those numbers into the computer, then such human error can occur. I didn't think it was a big deal as INV's head of customer services swooped into action the moment we reported it and it was rectified within 5 minutes. However, Mr Chang got really upset and he told me that his client kicked up a huge fuss, claiming that his life savings has 'disappeared' - I tried to reassure him that if such mistakes occur, they will be fixed within moments and his clients' investments would never 'disappear' over a clerical error like that. It was a simple mistake that was easily rectified. I thought that was the end of the matter but Mr Chang simply wouldn't let the issue go: he kept writing these really long emails (in traditional Chinese) and I had to translate them for him - these were letters of complaint, going on and on about how this was such a very serious mistake.

Now I know two of the directors at INV really well and one of them even met me in London for a coffee recently, he said, "what more does Mr Chang want? We have apologized many times, but he keeps sending us these letters of complaint and we don't know what more to do to appease him." I think the crux of the problem is the Mr Chang isn't communicating directly with the staff at INV - everything has to go through me because of the language barrier and I am the one who gets the reassurances that they do take such mistakes seriously; because Mr Chang isn't getting the message directly from INV and he is getting it instead through me, maybe that's why he feels that he isn't being heard. Being the patient person that I am, I tried to help Mr Chang out: I told him that it is pointless repeating yourself over and over again, when you have a serious grievance with INV, you have the right to make a formal complaint but you should also be very clear about the outcome you expect from them. So for example, are you after revenge? Do you want heads to roll - do you want them to take disciplinary action against the clerk who was responsible for the decimal point debacle? Or is there anything else that they can do in terms of their customer services to improve their services for you? Did you lose money as a result of this mistake and thus have a right to ask for compensation? You are not making it easy for INV to react to your complaint because you didn't tell them what you want them to do in response to your letters of complaint - so I placed the ball in Mr Chang's court - tell them what you want them to do next, what kind of response are you expecting?

I thought that would be the end of it but no, Mr Chang took my cue and made it very clear what he wanted. He wrote an email asking them for an all expenses paid trip to the UK, to visit INV's head office in England. That's right: flights, hotels and of course, an interpreter when he visits INV's head office. I rolled my eyes in complete disbelief: I tried to tell him, this has never been done before, INV do not give out free trips to their clients even when they have made grave errors. You're essentially asking for a free holiday to England as compensation for that mistake and that's not going to happen. I'm not even going to translate this email as you're being unreasonable. Mr Chang then got really defensive: he claimed that they made a huge mistake with the decimal point and it was necessary to meet him in person in the UK in order to rebuild trust and confidence in INV's services. So I had a long chat with the directors from INV and they told me that Mr Chang is a relatively small client who hasn't put in that much business through them - they have far bigger clients who have much bigger accounts with them and if there's any kind of money to be spent on 'rewarding' clients, then obviously it would be the ones who bring the most business to INV and that certainly isn't Mr Chang. Mr Chang then made a second demand - he wanted INV to send a director to Taiwan to apologize to him in person and again, I told him that this wasn't possible, be reasonable. Taiwan isn't an important market for INV, they are far more focused on Europe and the Americas. Needless to say, I got loads of super angry emails from Mr Chang about the way he has been treated by them.

So, allow me to analyse how I would have handled the situation: the problem with Mr Chang is that he is totally unfamiliar with the way business is done here in Europe and instead of asking me for help (hey, I may be from Singapore but I've spent more of my life in Europe than in Asia), he didn't once say, "hey Alex, you live and work with these white people, teach me how to get through to them." Nope, he's rather stubborn as an older, Taiwanese big boss who is too proud to ask for help from me. The way I see it, INV has already apologized and the error was fixed within minutes - there are still certain things that Mr Chang can ask by way of compensation. You see, platforms like INV make all kinds of charges whenever a client places a trade and in this case, Mr Chang could have asked for a full refund of all the charges that INV made to process that latest trade because of the error they made after updating the details of that trade to the clients' account. It wouldn't be unusual for INV to then do a trade like that for free if it has been demonstrated that they did make a serious error when processing the trade. That is a substantial amount of money given that it is calculated as a percentage of the amount invested and then Mr Chang could have then taken that money to buy himself a plane ticket to come to London (or do whatever he wanted with it). No, he wasn't willing to listen to me - he said that he would lose face (ah yes, we're dealing with Chinese people here) if INV didn't give him exactly what he wanted and he blamed me for giving him the idea of telling them exactly what he wanted them to do. I said yes, but within reason Mr Chang. He then said they are a big company in England, so surely they can find a few thousand dollars to pay for his holiday to England.

I tried to explain it to Mr Chang: take a look at it from their perspective, do they give out free holidays to England each time they make a mistake? How do they account for the money in the case of an audit? What about accountability to their shareholders or investors who want to know where or how the money is spent? Mr Chang then claimed that in Taiwan, when a big company makes a mistake like that, they do not hesitate to offer gifts or money as compensation - so he is demanding a gift now as a sincere expression of apology, simply processing the trade for free (and hence refunding the rather substantial fee they would have otherwise charged) is not the same as a gift. He even suggested that a member of staff ought to fly over to Taiwan and offer that gift in a 'red envelop' 红包 to him in person, that would a truly sincere gesture of apology. Good grief, where do I even begin? Giving extravagant gifts to clients is seen as a bribe and would be viewed as corruption in the West and thus that's a line no decent company would cross! The only reason why I deal with people like Mr Chang is because I did tell my boss that there is business to be had in Taiwan and I had received a small budget for business development in Taiwan. But good grief, it is so much harder to deal with Taiwanese clients than white people. I would never get a client kicking up this kind of tantrum from one of my white clients. The most frustrating thing about Mr Chang is that he has a complete lack of social skills in this context - perhaps he is quite comfortable in his stomping ground in Taiwan, where he knows the local language and business culture, but the moment he has to deal with white people, he is refusing to even acknowledge that white people have quite a different business culture and he is not even listening to me when I am trying very hard to help him out. It can be so immensely frustrating!

Is Mr Chang going to get anything out of INV? I doubt it, I'm not going to bend over backwards to help him if he refuses to listen to me - besides, I have already told him exactly how to get his 'free holiday to England' (or at least the money for it, how he spends it is entirely up to him), he just wouldn't listen to me and do as I say. Look, I've dealt with such situations before and the first thing to do is to find out what the other party is authorized to do and what they are not allowed to do. I do travel a lot - both on holidays as well as on business and I once had trouble with my hotel room in Barcelona, they placed me in a very noisy room and I had to change rooms. They apologized for the inconvenience and I was offered a 25% voucher for my next stay with them - but the problem was, I didn't know when I would return to Barcelona and even if I could, would I want to take my chances with them again? So I held them to ransom with a poor review on Tripadvisor about the problems I had with the noisy room, then when they reached out to me to ask me to remove that poor review online, I said I would do it if they retrospectively applied that 25% discount to my stay. Of course, this was a business trip so my company paid for the room, so when they refunded the money I pocketed it of course, I wasn't going to give it to my company. And since this being a 5-star hotel in Barcelona and I was there for the full duration of a banking conference, let's just say it was a tidy sum of money for me to go shopping with. I got what I wanted and I was satisfied.

Then there was the case in Sliema, Malta when once again, another guest checked in very late at night and made a lot of noise, waking me up. I kicked up a big fuss - so I got a free upgrade to their best suite, free breakfast for my stay there and free parking for my rental car. I was happy to get all these things for free, but I knew I had to be reasonable in terms of what I could get out of them for free: would I be able to ask them to pay for my flights as compensation for having been woken up in the middle of the night? Of course not, that would have been a ludicrous request. But could I have demanded an update to a better suite in the hotel? Of course I could, I know the duty manager has the right to do that as long as it doesn't involve taking money out of the till and giving me a stash of euros. Then there was another case in Hanoi, Vietnam when we had trouble with the travel agency, we had booked a number of excursions and hotels with them but they had to change the itinerary for us at the last minute as the excursions we had requested were not available on those dates. Here's what usually happens in these cases: say if there is an excursion to the waterfall, they would run the excursion if there's enough people to fill the minibus to take the tourists from the city to the waterfall. But if only two people booked the waterfall excursion for that day, the tour agency would persuade them to visit the waterfall on a different day instead. So I said fine, we'll change the dates but I want something in return - how about a free dinner at a nice restaurant in Hanoi's old town near our hotel? Sure enough, we got a wonderful dinner for two that night in Hanoi. Remember what I said about telling them exactly what you want to make things right? Do pay attention and learn guys.

I could go on and give you plenty of more examples of how I have managed to negotiate free stuff on my travels, but there's a certain way to do it: firstly, make sure you have a good reason for asking for free stuff. Secondly, when you make a request, make sure it is reasonable and proportional. Thirdly, make sure that this is something they can probably say yes to at once, that the duty manager has the power to agree to your request without having to seek approval from anyone else.  So in all of the case studies above, I applied all of those rules and got what I wanted because I negotiated with them in a reasonable manner. I'm afraid Mr Chang isn't being reasonable - he is being emotional and is now concerned about 'losing face'. Whereas I am a crafty salesman, I believe in the principle, "if you don't ask, you don't get, so ask away" but your chances of getting what you want is a lot higher if you know how to ask nicely and if you're willing to find out what the other party is willing/able to give away just to pacify you. There's a part of me that wishes that I could have simply waded in and sorted everything out for Mr Chang and got him the refund (man I could have sorted that out painlessly in less than an hour), but I seriously didn't think he was going to behave in this manner. I knew that there was a language barrier dealing with the Taiwanese, but I didn't expect the differences in culture to be this vast. The irony is that Mr Chang is a very successful businessman in Taipei - despite everything I have told you in this blog post, yet he still manages to make a lot of money in Taiwan despite his apparent lack of social skills in the business world. Oh, go figure!

So that's it from me for now, what do you think? Have you ever dealt with someone like Mr Chang? Why are Chinese people so concerned about this issue of losing face? And how would you have handled the situation - are you good at getting people to give you stuff for free when things go wrong? Should I just step in and help Mr Chang get his refund, or should I stand back and wait for him to ask me for my help? I certainly don't want him to get the impression that his unreasonable approach can yield any kind of positive results - if there is to be a positive outcome and resolution to the situation, I want to take full credit for having found the answer. I don't even want anything from Mr Chang - just a simple, "I'm wrong, you're right, thank you Alex, you are amazing." Leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.