One of the biggest mistake I've made recently when dealing with a customer is to assume that their installation didn't change.

On 3 Aug, customer sent an email, saying they had problems entering data into the system. So, I had sent customer a series of questions, which customer then didn't reply.

Subsequently, customer sent me an email, asking me for a progress. How could I have made any progress when customer didn't answer the series of questions?

I had previously made a couple of calls to customer, asking some questions and customer absolutely refused to answer the questions, instead, asking me to check with my colleague.

And what I learnt today is really invaluable. When the same colleague called them, customer indirectly revealed why my questions were avoided. Customer had screwed up the environment, and dared not let her boss / supervisor know, which is why she evaded answering my questions.

This has caused quite a big hoo ha in the company recently because some of my colleagues thought I had mishandled the customer, and that I should guide the customer on how to use the software properly.

Need to figure out how to say it's not customer's fault (even though it really is) to customer's boss / supervisor, and not our fault (since it's not our fault that their installation screwed up).

And henceforth, I need to log a summary of all conversation so that everyone is in the loop on what's happening.