How to Handle Exceptional Projects That Put Your Brand Promise at Risk—Deciding When to Decline, Change Terms, or Improve

Key customers sometimes request deadlines, specifications, or prices that you cannot accommodate under normal circumstances. Prioritizing revenue and accepting the project may resolve the immediate situation. But if you fail to keep your promise to the customer while also compromising the quality of other projects and increasing employees’ workloads, your brand promise becomes nothing more than words.

The answer is neither to reject every exception nor to accept them all. Consider whether you can change the terms to ones under which you can keep your promise; if not, decline. Record the exceptions you accept and use them to improve operations or review the promise itself.

Classify Projects into Three Categories Before Accepting Them

Place each exceptional project in one of the following categories.

1. Can be delivered within the scope of your usual promise
2. Can be delivered if the deadline, specifications, price, or delivery setup changes
3. Cannot be delivered reliably even if the terms change

For the second category, make clear to the customer what must change for you to make a commitment. For the third, do not accept the project while leaving expectations vague. Explain why you cannot accommodate the request and offer any feasible alternatives.

For the definition of a brand promise that underpins these decisions, see What Is a Brand Promise?.

Five Points to Check When Making a Decision

1. State the Promised Outcome in One Sentence

“We will do our best” is not a basis for a decision. Specify the deliverables, quality, deadline, scope of support, and prerequisites on the customer’s side.

2. Check the Required Capabilities and Available Capacity

Look beyond the experience of the person responsible to check review arrangements, outsourcing, equipment, information, and time. A plan that depends on one person overextending themselves is not a repeatable system.

3. Check the Impact on Other Customers

If making an exception would compromise deadlines or quality for existing customers, you cannot decide based solely on the revenue from that project. Estimate the scope of the impact and the cost of recovery.

4. Present Terms That Can Be Changed

Restructure the terms into ones you can honor: extend the deadline, split the scope, revert to standard specifications, set aside a validation period, or reflect the cost of additional staffing and support. Raising the price alone may not resolve a capability shortfall.

5. Record Who Approved the Exception and Why

Record who authorized the exception and on what basis. If the same type of exception keeps recurring, the issue lies in product design or the delivery setup rather than in individual cases.

What to Do When You Fail to Keep a Promise

When a problem occurs, address the customer’s needs before focusing on brand messaging.

• Provide a clear point of contact that is easy for customers to reach
• Record the facts, expectations, impact, and desired resolution
• Consider immediate remedies separately from measures to prevent recurrence
• Compile similar cases and analyze their causes
• Decide what needs to change: the product, sales explanations, pre-contract checks, or internal training
• Have management assign resources and responsibility, and verify implementation

The public summary of ISO 10002:2018 describes complaint handling as a process encompassing planning, design, operation, maintenance, and improvement. It also covers an approach that is open to customers, complaint analysis and evaluation, management involvement, resources and training, and audits and reviews. It provides a useful reference for treating complaints as information for management-led improvement, rather than closing them with an apology from the employee responsible.

Embed the Process Across Teams

Exception decisions will not work if only the branding team understands them. Sales, manufacturing and development, customer service, and administrative departments need a shared understanding of “what we can promise and whom to consult.” For guidance on establishing internal decision criteria, also see What Is Internal Branding?.

Limitations of This Process

A low number of complaints does not necessarily mean high customer satisfaction. Some customers leave without contacting you. Likewise, changing an entire product in response to a single complaint can undermine the value it provides to other customers. Assess complaint volume, severity, recurrence, and scope of impact separately.

When legal, safety, or contractual judgments are involved, this practical process alone is not sufficient. Review by a specialist in the relevant field is necessary. The public ISO summary is also no substitute for a legal judgment on an individual case.

Conclusion

Keeping your brand promise in exceptional projects does not mean agreeing to every unreasonable request. It means clarifying the terms you can honor, declining if even revised terms would not allow you to keep your promise, and feeding problems back into improvements to your systems. Consistency in these decisions builds trust with both customers and employees.

If you want to make your promise consistent across sales, delivery, and customer service, explore HUV DESIGN OFFICE’s Services.

References

• ISO, “ISO 10002:2018 Quality management — Customer satisfaction — Guidelines for complaints handling in organizations” (public summary; current edition confirmed in 2023)
  https://www.iso.org/standard/71580.html

Author: Daisuke Irikura (Representative Director, HUV DESIGN OFFICE Co., Ltd.)