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Comment by M_Grey | Hacker News Reader

If you even think in terms of "firing" B2C customers, you will eventually fail. "The customer is always right" isn't some kind of service-minded epithet with goodness and wholesomeness in mind, no; it's a loud warning! The customer can make or break you, can cause you to spend disproportionate resources to undo what they can do to you. The customer can, with a Yelp or Tripadvisor review, a lawsuit or a blog post, undermine your entire carefully marketed existence.

If you seriously put your pride on a pedestal next to all of that, you just shouldn't be dealing with B2C in the first place; you will be a menace to your organization.

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This particular case isn't a great example because the customer posted one rude comment in a forum. I'm ignoring the bad review, since that's not good reasoning to part ways. Basically this customer hadn't yet crossed a line that would irk me.

However, to me, there is a line. "The customer is always right" can't be literal.

I have no issue parting ways, with a full refund, for toxic customers that repeatedly use abusive language with my employees. Especially when it's not relative to the situation. These kind of customers do exist. It's not common, but do e-commerce long enough and you'll run into one.

There are also (not often) customers that engage in return fraud or other activity that is just obvious cause to avoid them in the future.

I mean... yeah obviously, but your examples of toxic behavior and fraud are about as far from the case in question as possible, except insofar as they apply to the guy who bricked the door opener. I'm not suggesting that businesses tolerate abuse or fraud, but this is far from either.

"fuck this product" is also not abuse. its not even personal.

people put the slightest emotions they get on a pedestal as a valid reason to do and justify anything.

No it's not abuse. But it is an opening line that might hint the possibility of a customer that's just never going to be happy. And my suggested recourse would be to refund them immediately once you recognize that's the case.

"An opening line that might hint the possibility..." I'm sorry, but at some point you're just expecting the worst possible outcome from a relatively banal situation. Your role in that context would be show an interest and defuse the situation, and only after that failed to have an effect should you start to be concerned that this is a toxic case.

If you approach everyone who so much as barks like they're a mad dog, you'll end up meeting a shocking number "mad dogs".

Okay. It's a rude opener. I'll admit to that biasing my view. Starting a conversation with "your product is shit" sets a certain tone.

You're likely to get better service from me if you're polite. I don't feel badly about that.

You'll never get anything from me except polite interactions in that arena, and at least in part for just that reason. The problem is that in any B2C you'll have a range of people, a Normal Distribution, and that includes a fair number of angry, entitled, rude, dicks. Plenty of them can be safely, and easily defused; and the truth is that a lot of people "come in hot" especially online.

I respect your position, I do, and I wish it were the standard, but realistically it puts you at a potential disadvantage.

I just got fired. It's raining and close to freezing. The weather caused the worst traffic jam in months. It's 8 PM when I finally arrive home so I'm hungry. And now this app, which is nothing more than a single button, refuses to start.

"Fuck this product."

Correct use of the sentence

Well, his opening remark on the forum ended in "wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here.."

That appears to be before any contact with anyone at all.

That, alone, doesn't cross a line. But it is a clue that the interaction might quickly lead down a path where you choose to part ways.

I'd have been initially polite, helpful, try to fix the issue, etc. But there would be some line where I'd stop.

Impolite and "toxic customer"/"Thief" are worlds apart. If you can't deal with a broad selection of the average public, don't sell to them. It's really that simple, and the business world selects heavily against people who think that their product or their fiefdom is excepted form that rule.

I can see that viewpoint but there are successful businesses that draw the line in a different place than you do.

It's not about the lines that I draw or that anyone draws, it's about the fundamental power asymmetry in customer-business relationships. Obviously a bar or a B&B have to consider the whole pool of customers, but if you're in the business of selling someone an IoT garage door opener...

I admit that others view it differently. But I'm not apologetic about the idea that a business can choose how much rude behavior to tolerate. Especially if I'm willing to refund without return of the product.

Calling a thing a "piece of shit" and leaving a critical review isn't rude behaviour. This isn't tea time at Buckingham Palace.

Your call, I suppose it's subjective. But I personally consider it to be rude. Would it be an appropriate support response to suggest that maybe their phone is a piece of shit?

It's only rude if you believe that the customer has to respect the hard work and good intentions that went into the product, and make allowances if it doesn't "just work". They don't.

Similarly, I don't have to make allowances for people that can't manage basic civility. I wouldn't send back food with a "this is shit" comment at a restaurant. Even a fast food place. Because I'm interacting with a human being, and see no reason to be a jerk. As a side bonus, "sorry, this tastes bad, could I get something else?" has a higher likelihood of resolving the problem.

Counterexamples: Telcos. Banks. Grocery stores.

There's very little a customer can do to meaningfully impact either of them. Hell, the companies can be (and regularly are) shitty to someone personally, and they still will use their services.

EDIT: more counterexamples - Comodo. Lenovo. Uber. AirBnB. They were all involved in huge Internet shitstorms about anti-customer behaviours, and they don't look like they've lost anything through it. I've seen enough shitstorms - small and big, local and global - to learn that they generally don't mean a thing, and most people forget about them in a week.

The most notorious monopolies of our time. The things which bring down our economy with their shenanigans every so often because they so thoroughly own the political and legislative process. Huh?

Grocery Stores? I don't see how that applies... they tend to be highly customer-focused, and they certainly don't do the equivalent of bricking a product after selling it to you because they didn't like your tone.

Still I take your point... if you're a Unicorn then you play by different rules, until/unless it all catches up with you (as it is with Uber). If however, you're not a telecom monopoly, a giant bank, or just crazy like Uber (if for example you're trying to sell IoT fricking door openers) then you are in a very very different position don't you think?!

Again, yes and no. I know a few local on-line retailers that handle their own faulty services like so:

- bribe the customers leaving negative reviews into cancelling them, by offering e.g. free products

- use multiple accounts on the marketplace services, kill off an account after it got too many negative reviews and create a new one to continue

The point being, "customer is always right" is not something that works for all B2C; depending on your market type, there may be strategies that let you be pretty much immune from the effects of a wronged customer seeking revenge. For instance, commodity items are bought by people who are mostly price-sensitive; as long as you keep a lower price, even angry reviews won't mean much. This works well for brick-and-mortar grocery stores (and other inherently local stores) and for business that sell through on-line marketplaces like eBay. It's sometimes even beneficial to not have a strong social media presence - Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are a good place for angry customers to vent off and spread the bad word about you.

...Right, and the opposite of all of the positive ways to deal with it, would be bricking the device you sold to a customer, as in this case. We're not even talking about a bad review, just a forum post. While I grant your point about commodities, you can't be further from such a thing than an IoT garage door remote.

Basically, this is a business in which you need to desperately convince the customer to want an ongoing relationship with you, for a service they could get with a $5 remote, 9volt included.

I'm in no way defending this particular company here; I was responding to the issue of "customer is always right" wrt. B2C business.

The company here behaved wrong and they deserve whatever loss of business comes out of this mess, regardless of how rude the customer was. They handled it badly. That said, I have no particular love for IoT companies - I find the idea of those cloud-connected devices to be dumb from both user and engineering point of view. To be clear - I'm not opposed to smart devices per se - just those which require vendor's cloud, which makes them basically hardware-as-a-service, and which works against privacy and interoperability.

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