A missed design detail. Two months of silence. A customer ready to sue. Jennifer Bylo picked up the phone, owned every mistake without excuses, and turned a near-lawsuit into a raving review. Here’s exactly what happened and what it says about how Bay State Bath handles things when they go wrong.
The Customer Who Almost Took Me To Court Over A 2″ Mistake (And Ended Up Writing My Best Review)
How Poor Customer Communication Taught Us One Of Our Greatest Lessons
By Jennifer Bylo, Owner & President, Bay State Bath
I’m going to tell you a story that got pretty ugly before it got better.
Not because I like telling ugly stories. But because I think you learn more about a company from how they handle things when they go wrong than from all the five-star reviews in the world.
This one almost ended in court.
When A Small Detail Becomes A Big Problem
Mr. Sinnick had a beautiful new bathroom. New vanity, new countertop, everything installed clean and on time. The job was done, our crew had cleared out, and by every measure we could see, it looked great.
There was just one problem.
The bottom drawer on the vanity didn’t open all the way. Not by much. Maybe two inches of travel blocked by the baseboard radiator running along the wall beside it. A detail that our salesperson missed during the design phase. She should have added a filler piece to account for the clearance. She didn’t. Nobody caught it.
And nobody followed up.
That’s actually two mistakes. The missed filler. And then the radio silence. Mr. Sinnick had a $10,000 balance outstanding, and our office let two full months go by without collecting it. When I finally found out and dug into why, that’s when the full picture came out — the drawer, the radiator, the frustration that had been quietly building for weeks.
By the time I called him, he was done being patient.
The Conversation That Almost Went Sideways
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. That phone call got heated.
Mr. Sinnick felt like the lack of follow-up proved we didn’t care about the money or about him. “Obviously you don’t need that ten thousand dollars,” he said, “because your team never asked for it.”
And when I pushed back on the idea that two inches of drawer clearance wasn’t worth withholding $10,000, things escalated. He mentioned court. I mentioned a collections agency. For a few minutes, it felt like we were heading somewhere neither of us wanted to go.
And then I stopped.
“Mr. Sinnick,” I said, “what are we doing here? We’re supposed to be friends. I never talk to my customers like this. Somehow this conversation has gotten completely off track, and we need to bring it back.”
There was a pause.
And then we actually talked.
Getting Back On Track
The truth was: we made mistakes. The salesperson should have caught the clearance issue during the design. Our office should have followed up on the balance weeks earlier. Those aren’t Mr. Sinnick’s problems. They’re ours.
Once I owned that fully, without defensiveness, without trying to minimize the drawer issue or justify the billing gap, the whole conversation shifted.
We agreed on a resolution. We fixed the drawer issue. And by the end of the call, Mr. Sinnick told me he was going to write a raving review.
This is a man who, days earlier, was ready to take me to court.
What This Story Is Actually About
It would be easy to tell this story as proof that customers can be unreasonable. But that’s not the lesson.
The lesson is that two inches of blocked drawer travel — a small, fixable thing — can snowball into a near-lawsuit when it gets paired with two months of silence. The installation mistake was recoverable. The communication gap made it feel unrecoverable.
That’s why we have Claire. That’s why every active customer gets a call every single day. That’s why our salespeople are trained to think through every clearance, every filler, every detail that could become a problem after we’re gone, because the best time to catch something is before it becomes anything at all.
We’re not perfect. I’ve never claimed to be. But when something slips through, I pick up the phone myself. I own it. And I don’t stop until we’ve found our way back to being friends.
That’s not just how I run a business.
That’s how I live and how I was raised.
If you want to work with a company that takes full responsibility — before, during, and after the job — we’d love to show you what that looks like. Schedule a free design consultation today.
