Business 13 www.aftermarketonline.net APRIL 2026 could get my point across this way. I no longer think this is a good process, because Arthur is a very bad friend. Arthur stabs you in the back. Arthur is persuasive even when wrong. A modern approach My suggestion to each and every one of you is: make it very clear that you will not be arguing your point by e-mail. You cannot win against AI. You cannot argue a point even when you are correct. You will waste more time than you ever have before. You must not ask Arthur to help you, either. You could argue between the two computers, but your customer will become absolutely entrenched in their belief. Plus, this is taking up more brain space than it needs to. Isn’t AI supposed to save us all time? You must be aware that everybody has got a new friend, and he’s both a friend and an enemy. Assuming that you are confident and you have confirmed that your work is good, you must no longer correspond by e-mail (or letter) as much as humanly possible. My advice to you is make yourself available – and/or your manager or your tech – absolutely everyone who’s come across the issue, at the customer’s time, whenever suits them best. Make sure you are flexible and invite them to the workshop via a call, where they can review your solid processes and clarify what you mean. They can bring Arthur, of course. A couple of top tips: if an email comes in complaining, can you see the language is beautiful? Do they use the Em dash a lot (that’s the long dash —)? If so, maybe you should consider this is probably from your customer with help from their friend Arthur Ingram. But I suggest that, moving forward, you assume that every single customer complaint and every single correspondence has been handled by Arthur. Do not keep writing; Arthur will continue forever with more and more ‘facts’. You cannot win because every correspondence will simply reinforce their view that you are wrong and they are right. So, my brand-new policy, my most up-to-date mindset, taking the new technology into consideration, is to never allow your customer to become entrenched in the row. In my view, it is so very important to keep up to date. I think I’m basing that on a principle written and honed in 1937 by the wonderful Dale Carnegie in a book called ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’. The only way to get the best from an argument is to avoid it. Never ever allow your customer (or anyone) to become entrenched in the row. Once this has happened, you cannot, and will not, win. #! + !#+*!+*#*! #+*#! +* *#! +*
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