Client's employee keeps blaming us for everything. Turns out he's barely working. Do I tell the owner?

Posted by Sensitive_Service_27@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 84 comments

Long time lurker, first time posting. Would love some outside perspective on this one.

We manage a \~30 person company. Good client, been with us about two years. Over the last few months one of their support guys has become a nightmare. Constant complaints: his RMM agent keeps "disconnecting," the VPN is "broken again," ticketing tool freezes, our response times are too slow. He's been telling his manager that his work has basically ground to a halt because of us and the tools we set up.

We've investigated every single complaint. Checked endpoints, logs, session history. Some minor stuff we fixed same-day. Most of it we couldn't reproduce. But this guy keeps escalating and now the owner is calling us asking why things aren't working.

Here's the thing. I found out almost by accident a couple days ago that this guy is putting in maybe 10–12 hours a week. On a 40-hour schedule. The person who's been loudly blaming us for months for why "everything takes so long" just isn't working most of the week. The complaints just seem to be a cover.

Now I'm stuck. I'm not sure it's my place to tell the owner their employee isn't working. Moreover, I think they might feel like we're snooping around if we bring up that there is data that proves it. But this guy is actively destroying our reputation with this client. If we say nothing I think they churn and blame us on the way out.

What would you do?