You can't polish a turd: On customer service | Hacker News Reader

You can't polish a turd: On customer service

alexblom.com

13 pointsAlexBlom10 comments

That's not correct... you can, in fact, polish a turd.

http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-polishing-a-turd...

First thing that came to my mind as well.

It's too tempting to ignore the customer problems for as long as possible because effect is not immediately apparent, and once that resource is exhausted there is a huge pile of debt to be paid down before you get back to zero. At this point shunning customers is no longer a choice but a necessity - not only there is a huge backlog requiring huge temporary increase in manpower, the product itself ends up designed with sharp corners sticking out in places where customer complains have been routinely ignored for a long time.

It's a lovely trap for any large business to fall into, so that they can fail and give way to smaller, nimbler guys, who will in turn grow, repeating the circle of life.

Precisely. It's one of those things where the longer you put it off the more expensive it gets to fix and the harder it is to deal with. My vote is to just adjust to doing it on day one.

I think the word "debt" describes it rather accurately. The more you spend towards paying the interest the harder it is to gain momentum.

>Rule 2: Customer service is understanding

No, if you read this section, rule 2 should be that if you accept credit cards, you have a very liberal refund policy, like it or not.

You can choose to be an asshole about giving the money back, and make the customer go through the credit card dispute process, or you can be friendly and give the money back upon request. But the point is, you are going to be giving the money either way, so you might as well make it a less painful experience.

Another good rule: Read what your customer is saying.

I'm not one to often get cross with companies; but my last host really hacked me off by replying to a serious issue (serious to me anyway) with a one line dismissal.

Bad.

There are benefits to the business from good customer service, beyond word of mouth: I mostly buy things from newegg, amazon, zappos, and jcrew when given a choice, and don't even bother to comparison shop, because my time has value and it's not worth dealing with crap customer service unless I'm going to save at least 20%.

These companies all have one thing in common: You can talk to a human being when you have a question or a problem.

Got a problem with your Newegg purchase? Send them an email, and they respond, quickly. Ditto for Amazon. Zappos goes a step further, and lets you talk to an actual human being... for as long as you want.

Contrast this to dealing with any company focused on 'efficiency' rather than 'service'; Citi is the first company that springs to mind.

Citi wasted nearly an hour of my time the last time I needed to deal with them, all because they were so focused automating customer support to save on labor. Rather than making it easy for me, the customer, to get my problem fixed so that I could give them more money.

Guess who I avoid like the plague now?

This is why I founded my company; to make it easy for companies to connect the people with problems to the people who can solve them, without having to waste mountains of mental stamina on a support system designed by Rube Goldberg's dominatrix.

If you have a bad experience at Zappos, you can buy your next shoes somewhere else pretty easily. Zappos HAS to have amazing customer service to get people comfortable with the idea of buying shoes online.

To transfer all your banking away from Citi is a huge chore if you're already there, and most of the other big banks aren't measurably better. Citi has more power than Zappos in this situation - they're only being as good as they have to be (terrible).

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