Several years ago, the company I was working for at the time decided to save a little money by phasing out a successful product line that had been made in Canada for many years, and substituting it with one that came from China.

That’s all well and good. The only problem was, they didn’t advise their customers – or their sales team.

Four months later, we were all called together for a North American sales meeting and asked if there had been any quality issues with the product line. None of us had received any specific customer complaints, so they told us about the switch they had made, and congratulated themselves heartily on their success.

A few months later, one of my biggest accounts called to ask me about a change they had noticed in the quality of the product they’d been ordering from us for years. They asked me if anything had recently changed, and I dutifully told them that we now had a partner in China making the product to our specifications, and we had been shipping this instead.

For the next 15 minutes, the client proceeded to tear a huge strip off me for not advising them of the change. They were upset with my company for making the change in the first place, but they were even more furious with ME for not advising them of the change when I first heard about it.

I learned a valuable lesson that day. My company could have launched the made-in-China product as an economy line at a lower price, and still made a respectable profit.

Instead, by keeping the change a secret from both their employees and their clients, they cost themselves – and me! – one of our oldest and most loyal customers.