Silence is a business decision. This company just didn't know they were making it.
My mom is in her 60s. She lives alone. And last August, she realized her woodstove (her primary heat source) had broken internal parts that needed fixing before winter arrived.
She did everything right.
She called the company that sold and installed the stove. She took the photos they asked for. She waited while they ordered parts. She politely waited until October for the repair appointment.
That's when things got interesting.
When the technician finally arrived and took the stove apart, the news wasn't good. The stove needed to be fully rebuilt or replaced. And while they were in there, they discovered the chimney repair she'd paid another company to do the prior year was not up to code. They wouldn't reinstall anything until that was fixed.
Fine. Frustrating, but fine. She found a new chimney company (who serendipitously also sells and services stoves).
And then she waited to hear back from the stove company.
And waited.
And waited.
January arrived, along with a major storm, and my mom had a new stove, one purchased and installed by the other company that had actually stayed in contact with her. She was warm. The stove company was still somewhere in the wind.
April arrives, a full eight months after that first phone call. Enter the stove company that finally got its shit together enough to call and ask her how things were going.
She told them she wasn't happy with their lack of response and had gone elsewhere.
They didn’t know what to say, and that included not even an apology.
Don’t think that this is a story about a broken stove.
Because it is really a story about a company that accidentally built a masterclass in how to lose a customer, a sale, and their own reputation…all at the same time…without ever doing anything dramatically wrong.
No scandal.
No rudeness.
No fraud.
Just silence (the dreaded ghosting)
Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule is worth understanding if you run any kind of business where customers have to wait for you.
The TL;DR: people don't judge an experience by averaging out all the moments from beginning to end. They judge it by two things:
Everything in between gets compressed, misremembered, or forgotten.
The stove company showed up in October. Delivered bad news. Left a woman without heat going into winter, with a chimney problem she didn't know she had, and no clear timeline for resolution.
That was the peak.
Then they called in April (eight months after initial contact) without an apology, to ask about a stove she'd already replaced.
That was the end.
Those two moments are the entire experience now. Everything that happened before: the parts ordering, the attempted repair, whatever good faith existed at the start… is gone. The peak-end rule is at play.
Robert Greene wrote that reputation is the cornerstone of power, that once it slips, you become vulnerable from all sides. He was talking about strategy, but the same concepts apply to a woodstove company in a mid-sized market.
Reputation erosion in service businesses matters a lot. The stove company didn't wake up one morning and decide to damage their reputation. They just didn't call. Then they didn't call again. Then a customer who needed went elsewhere, and now has an unflattering story to tell others.
Stories are the currency of reputation. And in the age of Google reviews, Yelp, Nextdoor, and "does anyone have a recommendation for…” Facebook posts, that story doesn't stay in one living room.
Tommy Shelby could run his business like he was the only option in Birmingham. The threat of consequences kept people quiet. A woodstove company in 2026 does not have that leverage. Their customers have smartphones, star ratings, and absolutely nothing stopping them from sharing exactly what eight months of silence felt like.
The company didn't just lose my mom's business. They handed a competitor a long-time customer, multiple sales, and a five-star review, all because they forgot to make a phone call.
Cialdini's work on social proof gets used a lot in marketing to talk about testimonials and five-star reviews and the power of "people like you are doing this." That's all true.
What gets talked about less is that social proof works just as hard in the other direction.
Bad experiences travel with the same (arguably more) enthusiasm as good ones.
Frustration is a better storyteller than satisfaction. Nobody texts their neighbor to say "the stove company called back within 24 hours, thought you should know." They absolutely text their neighbor to say "don't use these people, I froze half the winter waiting on them."
The stove company has no idea how many potential customers they've already lost to a conversation they weren't in the room for.
What makes this genuinely maddening from a business and customer service standpoint is that none of this required a big fix.
A phone call in October. An email in November. A carrier pigeon in December. Any version of "hey, we know you're waiting and we haven't forgotten you" at any point across eight months would have gone a long way.
If you don’t have a follow-up system in place for your business, you could just as easily fall into this trap.
They stayed in contact.
They showed up.
They sold a stove to a woman who called them for a chimney repair because they were simply responsive.
That's it. That's the whole competitive advantage.
My mom wasn't looking to switch companies. She wasn't shopping around. She needed someone to keep her warm and keep her in the loop.