Fire your bad customers
preetamnath.com
preetamnath.com
One of those, letting the client go turned out to be a huge mistake, since the reasons turned out to be a temporary blip. In so many words, the great executive later returned, some things that were concerning/unacceptable while the exec was away were presumably reversed, but I'd already moved on.
Another, they just had an unsalvagable massive mess of a code base that an undergrad made, and they didn't appreciate how bad it was, and that it needed more than incremental work.
Before and after the regretted cut-loose client, I also didn't take on at least a few clients who I had misgivings about. Some of those were probably due to once-bitten, twice-shy.
Some problems I've learned to avoid, and I'll phrase them here as positives (I've found both the negative and positive examples):
* Clients who realize they need more than a low-end programmer. Like many people, I have a lot of experience working higher-end than that,
* Client respects you as an expert or competent professional. That doesn't mean they defer to you automatically. What you want to avoid are situations like someone key at the client thinking they always know better, on all topics. Which is a not-unusual phenomenon. One version to avoid is when they are the expert on all things, and they think they're only hiring worker drones to save time on things they know better on.
* Client is intelligent and constructive. If they're saying technical things that don't make sense, and when you attempt to discuss, to understand and possibly inform, you hit a brick wall, then you might have a lot of brick walls in your future if you take them on as a client.
* Client has enough money, is willing to spend it on you, and looks like they'll have enough money for a while. Complementary to this, I of course wouldn't take a contract like, say, someone self-funding a startup, and no matter what I did for them, it didn't look like they'd be viable.
* If client is a CS-ish professor (which I bump into probably more than most, since I have a fondness for some aspects/ideals of universities, and live in university neighborhoods)... Only take the client if you can find a situation close to that of a colleague of mine: works with a PI who respects him as both skilled and as a collaborator. It's not uncommon for a CS-ish professor to think they know more about practice than practitioners, and they get some (misleading, incestuous) validation from others in academia. I respect professors by default, and some are close friends, but egos and inaccurate perceptions about the world outside academia seem not-unusual. Also, universities are accustomed to cheap, captive labor (except for select higher-ups, and sometimes endowment hedge fund managers).
* Watch out for the casual oracle (I don't know whether there's an existing term?), and also be careful not to be the casual oracle. By which I mean a decision-maker has a friend or someone who they keep going to to check things you tell them, and this person overrules you. Normally, this would be fine, especially as a discussion, but what I'm talking about is like a rogue doctor, who diagnoses patients without ever having examined them, talked with a doctor who has, or even glanced at their ED chart, yet ends up overriding the actual doctors of the patients. I've seen this a few times firsthand (in tech, not with doctors), so it seems to be a thing, and I also had a friend once quit over it. If it's a thing, I don't know whether it's only an artifact of not respecting the person doing the work, or something else. A few times, I've also realized that I was being asked to be the casual oracle, and I tried to be humble and qualify, but now that I recognize this thing, I'll be even more careful.
I have a filter on new employees such that if they cannot fill out the application on the website, they don't get an interview. Same with customers - I deliberately channel them to the website because if they cannot figure out how to use our brainlessly easy website, I don't want to spend the next year walking them through.
There is a multiplicative hidden cost working with uneducated/lazy people people. It's like the locked doors theory of crime. The most criminal 0.1% of society costs society a 100x increase in security costs.
The same is true for romantic relationships - some are just not worth it.
This is probably a lesson that is endlessly learned by new junior consultants. When new consultants get into consulting through the fluent practitioner route (as opposed to the "warm body contract job shop" route), they tend to make the common assumption everyone is as excited as they are about the field, and the only difference between them and their clients' staff is time-on-keyboard, and perhaps some perspective.
There is a distinct category of staff that the new consultant will encounter who immediately glom onto the convenience of treating the consultant as a personal Google service, with the added bonus of not even having to sift through the search results and handed the answer. Kind of a value add when the check-signing manager witnesses this happening first-hand; many appreciate getting confirmation they bought the services of an expert.
However, the trap is the new consultant assumes the staff member will leverage these answers to find their own new lessons to learn. Or even remember the answer. This becomes a significant time sink, so different consultants develop different ways with different clients to mitigate this anti-pattern. Nothing to fire a client over (to bring us back to the original topic), but definitely an issue you want to keep tactics to employ in your back pocket for.
For context, I have been in consulting roles for most of my career, probably because of my proclivity to be "unsolicited advice guy". I see something amiss and I tell people about it. My delivery has changed and matured over the years, but I still cannot correct flaw.
An epiphany I had a couple months ago, and this is after 20+ years of this work, is that consultants are primarily organizational psychologists. They bring a lot to the project and the org, but it isn't the technical that takes the highest position. And in the case of the repeat-help-desk-can't-fish customer there are a lot of different issues at play. Some of the charitable ones are
- lack of confidence
- risk of getting blamed
- over worked, too much responsibility compared to the skills
- unrealistic deadlines by their managers
- personal issues prevent a lack of focus and inability to do deep work
If you deliver the n-th answer like you delivered the zeroth answer, they will think you have an infinite capacity for taking their burden. There are signals you can use to push back, explain how busy you are, frame you answer relative to a previous answer, answer the question with 3 questions and some tasks that if completed will solve their problem (Socratic help desk).
Consultants should make their customers and all of their customers look like rock stars, but we shouldn't let folks within the org use your knowledge and skills to make themselves look better. This particular pattern is damaging because while to the rest of the org they look amazing, their ego erodes and they keep coming back to the oracle for more answers and at some point they are only a mindless conduit.
In the case of an employee who is using you as a 2nd brain, one technique is do a pomo of the issue, give them mad props for the debugging, development, patience, etc while outlining the problem and how it solved. Make a group effort while giving them some praise but don't allow them to consistently take center stage.
On the flip side, one can find the staff members how share knowledge within the org, and synthesize new solutions from previous ones. These folks need to be protected, cultivated and propped up, they will save projects and your ass if handled with care.
The delicate balance to effect here is employing the techniques you outlined, against the deliverables and maintaining good working relationships with staff you depend upon to deliver to you information you need to accomplish what you were brought in for. Unless you correctly read your client organization and staff who you will be interacting with, and correspondingly pad your estimates, carrying out these techniques become mostly or all unbillable work.
The technique of doing a pomo works really well for issues above a certain complexity level. Often I can get a manager to enthusiastically sign off on incrementally adding to the engagement on a time and materials basis on top of the outcome-based fee I bill for such knowledge transfers, typically as one or a series of lunch and learns.
Below a complexity level (for example, "how do I enable tracing in <foo>?"), and it rapidly becomes nonsensical, and I use a lightweight (to the consultant) version of what you recommended. Depending upon the personalities involved, and facilities available, I usually ask for the request be re-framed as a ticket "so the entire team can learn now from the answer, and datamine the knowledge base in the future", and I suggest to the manager that the requester be officially tasked with documenting the answer into the team's official documentation repository with an official documentation template, that a project manager will then start chasing down. I also recommend someone else on the team "QA" the documentation by performing the procedure as documented.
The documentation doesn't have to be fancy, even a single paragraph suffices in some cases, but usually there is a lot of red tape involved. This delivers genuine benefits from the leadership's perspective, and for genuine "the organization didn't know how to do this", it does advance the organization's capabilities. The bonus for the consultant is it puts you back in the consulting seat, where you point towards how it is done in sufficient detail so someone can put together the steps (you might call out one or more particularly tricky steps, but usually just pointing in the right direction is enough), but the person doing the asking becomes responsible for proving and documenting the steps to their peers, project manager and manager. This cuts down on the frivolous requests to pretty much trivial amounts in my personal experience, without compromising on leadership's nor staff's desires.
I have been trying to re-route RTFM queries to inside the org by putting in support structures where there were previously none, as well as working on some training sessions that are basically "how to avoid RTFM queries" but in a respectful way.
I feel like this is much more true on the East coast. Lots of this resonates with time spent in Boston/Cambridge.
It also varies by department.
One of them emailed me with a subject line of "my account is broken! FIX IT!!!" and no body, to which I replied "how rude, do you think I'm your slave?". He replied in the same vein, saying that if I didn't fix it he'd go to a competitor, to which I said "it's a one-time payment and you've already paid me, if you leave you're just basically saving me time in support".
He replied a few hours later apologizing for his rudeness and detailing what the problem was, which I helped him fix, but it was fun to see how much customers expect to be able to walk all over customer service and how surprised they are when you don't take their shit.
To be fair, 99% of support emails are very kind and polite.
I don't like this attitude.
I guess most people here in HN never worked in customer support, or as cashier and such.
Treat people with respect. Customer support already mentally tax people, much more that you would expect if you never worked in it.
I have a customer facing job and I work closely with the customer service department so I'm exposed to a lot of this (I meet customers face to face as well), and it's shocking how rude and abusive some people can get to another human being.
I tell people all the time to stuff their attitude up their holes and start over if they want any help from me. I'm a human being; I will not accept people talking like that to me.
Those customers sure wouldn't accept it if I acted like that to them, why should the reverse be okay?
I don't see that it's reasonable to disregard the issues of a paying customer on account of their poor netiquette. They aren't a professional tester filing a bug-report, they're a paying customer with poor communication skills. I don't see that refusing to help them, and even mocking them, is an acceptable response. At the very least you're holding yourself to a low standard.
Paying gets you support, it doesn't get you the right to be rude to the person you're asking for help.
What would you have done?
My takeaway from the reactions in this thread is that businesses are culturally expected to let the customer walk all over them, and anything other than "thank you for your abuse, now please let me help you" is considered rude.
Yes, their tone is rude, but it's not as if it's outright abusive. One can't be so thin-skinned as to take offence at punctuation. They also failed to provide any details about the problem, but that's what happens when you deal with customers rather than professional testers. The ability to file good bug-reports (or support requests) is a skill; you can't very well insist that all your customers must have it.
I sincerely don't understand how that's controversial at all. If someone on the street saw you and said "Hey! You! Help me cross the street NOW!!!" would you feel obligated to help them? Would it be rude to say "you can't talk to me like that"?
> I sincerely don't understand how that's controversial at all
There are gradations. If the customer were being truly offensive, that would be one thing, but in this case they're really just making themselves look like a petulant teenager.
I'd have rolled my eyes and got to work, knowing they'll probably behave better (and regret their silly outburst) once they know I'm taking them seriously.
If an employee sent a message with this level of rudeness, then sure, you'd want to have a word with them about their netiquette, but customers can't be held to the same standard.
This is where I think you're mistaken. Customers and clients like this, once they see they've gotten you under their thumb, will be more than happy to continue exploiting you.
Remember Stavros was charging a small lifetime fee. Clients from hell will twist this and try to make you their personal developer for as long as possible.
You seem to think that Stav should be thankful for the opportunity to fix the particular bug, but who's to say he wouldn't have discovered and fixed it on his own time?
Customers can and should be held to the same standard. Otherwise you end up with shit customers.
I'm not saying you're obligated to be a total pushover. You're certainly not obligated to agree to every feature-request, or even to every bug-fix request. I still don't think the way they handled the support request (such as it was) was appropriate.
> Stavros was charging a small lifetime fee. Clients from hell will twist this and try to make you their personal developer for as long as possible.
We don't have reason to believe this is what's happened here. I figure the customer was probably just frustrated and, yes, rather rude.
If you make the decision to sell a lifetime service, you take on some level of lifetime support obligation.
> You seem to think that Stav should be thankful for the opportunity to fix the particular bug, but who's to say he wouldn't have discovered and fixed it on his own time?
If handling their issue properly results in uncovering a bug, that's a good thing. I don't think it's of much consequence if you feel thankful.
The customer was still rude, sure. Does that outweigh the benefit of discovering a bug? I don't think it matters. The question is about offering good service and handling rude customers.
> Customers can and should be held to the same standard. Otherwise you end up with shit customers.
But you've already chosen to take their money in exchange for a lifetime service. It's not the same as declining to renew a contract.
If the customer is being outright abusive, that's reasonable grounds to decline to take on their support request. I'd draw the line somewhere above this sort of low-level rudeness though.
Also if you have them on a tiny service it's likely an indication of poor user experience: poor user interfaces, poor performance, poor documentation, poor reliability, etc.
Really? You don't think so? I begin my emails with "hello" and end with "thank you", which I have been taught is polite. What would be rude to you?
When I'm frustrated I try to collect myself and be mannered. It's not an excuse. Communicating properly not only makes everyone lives better but also allows better understanding. It's more efficient.
So I'm using a car sharing system. The car is great. The app is a weird, slow, HTML-ish thingy that appears to trigger bluetooth bugs and frequently loses state.
So I drive my family to a friend. My partner will then continue the trip with our kid. What you need to do, is get out, lock the car, and close the reservation. Then my partner can create a new reservation, and continue driving.
We're already late. It's hot outside. Kid is crying. I open the app, lock the car, and close the reservation. App fails with vague error. My partner is standing there, kid and phone in arm, asking "c'mon hurry".
I call the support line, and give him the problem. The support guy asks me to go through a series of steps. Then I flip and scream: "DAMNIT I'm sick and tired of this app failing me, it's never simply a painless process and now I'm standing here in the heat with a crying kid".
He laughs and says: "I understand but I'm trying to help you, sir. How about you let me talk to the partner?"
To this day, I'm both ashamed, amazed and happy how professional this guy was.
Sure, customers could be rude(I wish they were not but some people have a bad temperament or have something else going in their life and this was a tipping point) but did they wake you up in the morning and forced to create that app and give it to them for the price you sell it? I am sure that it's the other way around, you made an app that promises to solves a specific problem and you offered someone to solve their problem for that low price and they are unhappy that you did not kept your part of the deal.
I would be very pissed off too if the developer of a product that I bought decides that it's not a good business and makes the product unusable. It's not my job to calculate the fair price for the product, the product developers must do the calculation since they come up with the offer in first place. If the deal is made, I expect to to receive the full promised benefits of the product I bought.
That's actually why we have customer protection laws.
In my view, you extend people basic courtesy, whether you're paying them or not, and paying doesn't give you the right to act entitled. Price doesn't enter into it, I reply the same way to every rude customer, except one-off payments don't have "I won't give you any more money" to fall back on to excuse their bad behaviour.
People condemn individuals who are rude to their servers, but it seems to me, from the reactions in this thread, that they would just as easily condemn servers for pointing out the rudeness.
People have become so entitled in all aspects of life, that they forget that there are people on the other end of their abuse.
The capitalist motto that "the customer is always right" has created the most entitled generation of rude and abusive customers.
If someone is defending "customer is always right", then they've probably never had a client from hell.
The seller screws you over? Leave the 1 star review, get your refund and don't have to look back.
This is entirely orthogonal to support - customer protection laws define what a customer is entitled to. Often, the call to customer support is an attempt to expedite the process beyond what the laws dictate. Many companies will gladly comply, as even a happy ex-customer is a win. But if someone's being rude, it's only fair to tell them to send a filled-in form by letter and expect a reply in 14 business days.
What happened to "we don't deal with terrorists"?
The answer of the developer seems reasonable to me if the point was "do this or I'll go to competitors", well, it's you right, do it then.
And if the customer was really that bad as it seems, I would have refunded them and let them go for good.
No amount of money can buy my time if I don't want to spend it doing something I don't want to do.
Customer protection laws are there to protect customers against misbeahavings, if I buy a Sony Television and they refuse to fix a broken one, I can appeal to customer's protection, if they refuse to add WIFI to a model that was born without it, it's in their rights.
If your skin is too thin to deal with angry customers you should not be facing them. There’re plenty of back office jobs out there. If you’re an enterpreneur, you probably should hire someone if you’re too easily offended.
Most of those angry customers are people who are suffering some kind of pain inflicted by your product. Some people are arsholes, others don’t handle stress well. Some have something else going on with their lives and this was a tipping point. Others are simply rude. But terrorist? No, they’re not terrorists.
Isn't terrorism about "making enemies"?
That's what you wrote.
> If your skin is too thin to deal with angry customers you should not be facing them
Isn't it exactly what the OP did?
> If you’re an enterpreneur, you probably should hire someone if you’re too easily offended.
I'm almost never offended.
But I'm not a psychologist, I don't have to deal with people hanger management problems and honestly I\m not even trained to.
> Most of those angry customers are people who are suffering some kind of pain inflicted by your product
That nobody ever forced to buy.
Small companies are usually made by a handful of people, working on a few products, all day.
Complaining that their support is not the best around is futile, they get the blame simply because they offer some form of support, because in the end they care about their customers and they obviously care more about 99.9% who appreciate their work than those few who do not.
The real offenders - Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. etc. - don't even offer a customer support while making billions out of their users.
There's a potential that you're paying a huge premium (that you don't even see) just for the enjoyment of being rude to customers. Maybe that's something you value extremely highly, I don't know.
In the general case, I agree that you would lose money by not tolerating rudeness, but think that one generally has a societal responsibility to call out bad behaviour, to let people know that that's not acceptable. Also, I think that rude customers are generally not worth it because they tend to cost more than they bring in, statistically.
So while income could be maximized by acting differently, Stavros chooses to optimize for his well being instead.
??????
It does not enter his mind that normally I make a third of that and so I am very happy with the windfall. Heck, with hindsight I could see how I could have also made a million, but only by worrying over every dollars I invested. There is more to life than spend all your time thinking about how to make more money. I have gone camping, hiking and living at a cabin by a river. He on the other hand sound like he spent the entire year glued to his computer monitor trying to make more.
Sure, that's true.
> for the enjoyment of being rude to customers
I was rude to customers? For pointing out they can't talk to me like that? I may have gotten the definition of "rude" wrong.
Besides, people like the customer in question come once in a decade (to me, anyway), so it hasn't been a problem.
In this case, I'd pay money to not deal with a customer like that.
"You don't think that was rude from them in the first place, I am answering in the same manner they talked to me. If they don't want it, then they should learn to talk nicer to me in the first place. Instead of assuming they can say whatever they want and get away with it.".
Interestingly, in the last decade my relatives have been a lot more polite with me when we talk.
Is it a bad thing necessarily? If this customer brings more trouble than value, that wouldn't it be the best move to dump it to a competitor?
And even if it's not technically a service, but say some closed source software or whatever, the same idea still applies for future bug fixes and maintenance, at least in my mind. At least for anything semi-critical.
That said, support as a subscription (or alternatively, pay-per-issue) is totally fine by me. I'm also fine if new features are added to Version 2, and I later have to decide whether to upgrade or not.
And although it is not about the money for me, it frequently does pay off. I usually opt for the longest recurring subscription (if lifetime is not available) which usually has steep discounts and in the case of my XM radio... still enjoying that lifetime subscription.
Put a sustainable pricing model in place that can afford support staff.
Sure, a bunch of cheapskates will up and leave - there will surely be a second rate competitor who will pick them up and offer the same poor or nonexistent support all over again.
One thing I learned from experience is that it's the people who pay the least who are the neediest and most frustrating to deal with.
As someone who has partaken in a support organization where 99% were annual payments and 1% were "golden licenses" (pay once, never again), I can confirm that the 1% were by far the worst.
I used to have a similarly bad attitude when I had low metered pricing. Once I insisted on monthly account minimums I could afford to hire a nice customer service person and not be so touchy all of the time.
This was a nice example of when not to. Thanks.
The way I handle most support requests is to make the UI easy enough so that people don't have that problem in the first place, though many still do, partly because of the unorthodox "email token to log in" system I switched to recently. Many people weren't used to that.
Back in the day Angry Birds cost $0.99 with no ads and you could use it forever. I downloaded it again recently just for nostalgia purposes and there is no option to get rid of ads. EA had a version of Tetris that cost $0.99 that was released during the 3.5” era was never upgraded, but stayed in the App Store until iOS didn’t support 32 bit apps. They replaced it with an ad supported version.
Let’s say you spend $100,000 to make a piece of software, you sell it to 150,000 people at a $1 a piece... and that’s it. People don’t keep paying for it, but you also don’t keep investing in it. You move on to making something new.
I don’t like this idea that you need to keep making money off something that you made years ago.
But more importantly, if you bought MS Office for a one time fee of $100 and the next month, Apple introduced a new form factor or new features and either MS didn’t support it all or forced you to pay the full retail price, would you be upset?
People buy apps and expect them to continue working when they upgrade their phone. What are you left with besides ads and subscriptions without upgrade pricing?
On the other hand for productivity apps, I would expect them to support split screen on the iPad when it was introduced and the File picker (it did).
Should Apple also have kept the Silicon needed to support 32 bit apps forever?
Clearly, there are other types of software that this doesn't make as much sense for.
I sent a rude email to Gumstix in 2012 that I regret. If you are on here I am sorry.
I'm not arguing against calling out poor behavior... I've just seen startups with this business model and attitude get absolutely crushed when one bad customer hires a lawyer.
"fix it!" -- "please give more details" or "sorry, this feature is not a near term deliverable" (which is a polite request to get lost). "I am going to a competitor" -- "we think our product is better, but encourage users to try alternatives", etc. My 2c.
Maybe it's possible that not pandering to the deadbeat clients actually improves your profitability?
There's also the fact that being a dick to rude people doesn't feel good to everyone. I can only truly speak for myself here, but being rude in proportion to some random person who started it and totally deserves it leaves me feeling bad afterward, like I allowed myself to get trolled. An angry client email, a profane reply to an innocuous online comment... You have the luxury of asynchronous communication to take a moment, let the blind rage pass, and reply in the even-keeled diction of business communications, maybe even killing them with kindness. Or just ignore 'em.
And with less customers the profits DOUBLED!
Kudos to you for well handling that specific situation and making/letting the customer get back on track.
Thanks! It seemed to work out well for both me and the customer in the end.
I think an annoying thing is that people are (seem to be) completely unaware that they're (their brains) doing this
One day that guy stopped rating our app, and things started getting better. Yeah, it’s a bad idea to put the fate of your business in a single app, but we were just starting out.
This happened because we kinda fired our one customer. From that day, everyone who asks for a refund even after using up the services gets a refund. Feature requests go to a voting arena; so far so good. We’re not sinking now.
Like you highlighted, it's even worse on mobile app stores as it's easy for them to get their friends to leave bad ratings.
Great that you survived and grew out stronger from the experience :)
Look, amazon offers refunds when people send back a brick instead of a computer and jeff bezos is rich enough to compete in the space race 2.0
I don’t do this. Not because I am a good person with morals but because I’m scared of being banned from Amazon.com Amazon.com can easily track what items I looked at and what items I place on my cart. What’s to stop them from tracking what items I return?
He hasn't been banned yet, though I kind of hope he does.
Amazon is still making fabulous amounts of money, prices are still low there, and the policy is still generous to the customer.
Culture is in general becoming a less pleasant, asshole-take-all experience because your "friend" embodies how trust and social fabric is corroded away. Not by big, monolithic, evil entities people like to rant upon here, but by everyday people like him making poor choices.
Choose better decisions [2].
[1] https://qz.com/772273/the-sneaky-genius-of-americas-lenient-...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/elal2/have_you_e...
When I notice decisions made by people like what your friend does, if talking about it doesn't produce a change in choices, I instantly distance myself from them and then gradually cut them out of my life. Ethics is what you do when you think no one is looking on. Your mileage may vary, but personally, I have too little time in my life to spend on people who I have to worry about whether they will screw me over if the situation is just right. The cognitive load is not worth it.
And for fraud... in the US you can lose max $50 to a credit card fraud incident ($500 if you are really negligent) by law.
So I think americans enjoy protections not available in other parts of the world.
I actually think this makes good sense. It eliminates the need for people "to take things into their own hands", or be overly cautious, so spending is increased.
I think it was matt ridley's book the rational optimist (?) that said that trust correlates with trade.
1. They're interacting with a real person
2. They didn't just dump their money into a black hole
So I always start with empathy and an offer to refund their cost, and then proceed with the troubleshooting. Most of the time, it's something like, oops I put a dead battery in, or set it up wrong.
Refunds are part of the cost of doing business. I have an extremely high quality standard, to make sure those refunds are quite rare.
A person who used to blog about the online junk business said that the only reasonable policy is: Refund instantly, and ban the customer forever.
Any account that only gives 1 or 5 star reviews, should probably have the value of those reviews reduced. A new account created only to give an extreme review of one product, is probably not too credible. Established accounts that give varied and nuanced reviews are more useful and more valuable.
These considerations should go into the calculation of the final rating, as well as which reviews are featured. That way, I think you can discourage fake or toxic reviews and reduce their impact, and focus more on honest reviews.
https://www.amazon.com/Rain-X-RX68106-ICER-WASHER-FLUID/dp/B...
This wiper fluid is known to cause expensive failures for rain wiper fluid sensors but it has a cheerful 4.6/5 aggregate rating, despite the numerous 1 star reviews saying the product broke their car.
But it would be useful for normal accounts. Some people are just super-critical of everything. A 1 star review from such a person shouldn't count for as much. Same thing on the other side with people who only give 5-star reviews.
If you are selling directly, enforcing the T&C against scammy customers is much easier.
Ranting on forums is far less effective and satisfying to the ranter because it's not boiled down to a 1-star rating and because it's easy to recognize a rant as such. So it's less attractive to begin with.
Assume the customer has a point, even if you don't fully get what the point is. If they are not happy for whatever reason, promptly give them their money back, apologise for the bad experience, and move on.
Furthermore, your customer support should never be defensive; their job is not to protect your company but really side with the customer. Early on, when every dollar counts, it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to argue with the customer to keep their money. Just don't do that, it will annoy the customer and you'll have to refund them anyway.
Yes, some people will take advantage of this, especially with refunds. That's the cost of doing B2C business, perhaps with digital products in particular where it's hard to prove the customer “received value”.
When they say ”the customer is always right”, as cheesy as it sounds, they have a point. And it's not that the customer is always technically correct, but assuming that stance will be better for your business.
They might have identified something that many other people have experienced, but didn't bother to tell you.
Depending on the situation, I usually gave a refund before asking for more details and see how the product can be improved from this.
I'm in old school insurance and we even have legitimised platforms to catch cheaters, liers and those that would threaten our staff. They don't get insurance anywhere after things like that. I would say that on average that leads to better premiums and better customer service, having procedures to remove the bottom .1% from service.
A transaction shouldn't be based on received value (ex post), but on perceived value (ex ante). Two parties commit to a contract and follow through. We (EU) have laws about how to deal with problems after a legal commitment is made even for online. I think the US has less of that leading to the concept of (ex post) service as being free returns, unlimited refunds etc. It makes business harder, in a way. You can't guarantee happiness but you can guarantee delivering your part of the deal. It's a different mindset based partly on different legalities.
Interesting. Are you saying that insurance firms share info about bad customers?
I rephrase it: the first and main goal of the support person is to keep you as a client, not to solve your problem.
I learned that when I applied for such a job, was given half an hour of sitting next to a support person and listening in to conversations between customers and that support person.
Then I got a 5 minutes interview where I was asked what I thought was the purpose and first objective of the job I was applying to: "Before passing the door I'd have said to solve customer's problems but now I can see it's more like... 90% is to keep the customers from leaving, 10% solve the problems. It doesn't matter if the problem gets solved.". The recruiter/head of service and my eyes met and we instantly both agree it wasn't a place for me ^^.
And wired DSL with 3Mbps from phone company doesn’t count as broadband internet, in my opinion.
I did CS for networking hardware. Very easy to troubleshoot, plus I have all Cisco Certs. I could tell immediately what was wrong, within seconds of the call. Still you needed to dance around with the (angry) customer for 6-20 minutes, sometimes hours. Yes, hours. It was company policy to never hang up. Bad policy. That got them very high employee churn and costs.
It was torture when all you want to do is to just solve the problem. It's way more than that.
I got a very nasty review and had a hard time understanding how this user had such a bad experience - my app cannot be doing this, there's no such use case. I was sure that the user is writing this in bad faith but I apologised anyway.
Turns out, if a user follows a specific path they can get into a confusing situation that can be misinterpreted as App trying to force them do something that they don't want to do. The unhappy user had a very valid point despite the fact that it took me a month to understand the situation.
As a developer, and a user, I strongly agree that you should never ever argue with your users. Most of the times the reason for a pissed of user is a bug or miss-communication that you failed to identify.
Marco Arment - the author of Overcast a popular podcast app for iOS - has said repeatedly that if he could just offer refunds instead of dealing with an irate customer he would.
Special feature requests were tied to minimum spend contracts.
If they’re not and I call you on the phone for 1 minute and you send me a $200 invoice, I’m not paying it. Sue me and see if the invoice is a contract.
An invoice is just a formal request for payment. It doesn’t itself legitimise that request.
Otherwise I could send you an invoice for $1m out of the blue and according to that logic you’d have to pay me.
There must have been some agreement, most likely in the form of a contract, in advance, for you to have to pay that invoice.
And even then, some companies employ large teams of people whose entire job is trying to avoid or delaying paying invoices in order to improve their cash flow.
An agreement with consideration is a contract. (Consideration means something of value is exchanged.)
However the agreement is made. It could be on the phone, text, smoke signals, anything. Though if it's denied later you may have a hard time proving the contract was made.
Usually an invoice is sent after an agreement. You have to pay those because you already made a contract to pay (written or not, formal or informal), and quite often an invoice provides formality that was lacking before, crystallising the expected amount. The act of paying it generally signifies final agreement to that amount.
For business contracts, often an invoice is the first time the buyer sees the exact amount the seller is expecting, because of details that weren't hashed out in advance (no need). For example per-hour freelancing can be like that; the buyer learns the number of hours the seller claims to have worked from the invoice.
But people dispute invoices all the time if they aren't expected or differ significantly from the amount expected.
I have never worked with a company that bought Oracle products, but I still have a bad experience from their presale calls.
If you say you're not going to answer in a positive, then you also shouldn't answer in the negative.
So replying once in the negative reveals negligable information and probably does not risk identifying the vendor at all.
Of-course, I did have one call that took me only 5 minutes to drive to the site and the three minutes to change the toner in the printer.
The executive secretary who would not talk to me over the phone because she was so important suddenly found she would have to explain a two hour service call (1 hour travel, 1 minimum service time) to her boss. :)
Very few rich customers aren't a handful. Let them make you rich first, then if you're lucky, you'd be surprised how quickly you outgrow them and have all sorts of tools at your disposal to deal with them.
Be polite instead.
A somewhat smarter pricing model, in my own opinion, is rather than charging someone $200 for a phone call, sell them "coupons" in advance where one coupon equals one support contact. When they have used up N percent of their available coupons, send them an automated e-mail and tell them that future contacts will be denied unless coupons are available.
This way, you get the money up front, which is good. Customers that don't contact you a lot are also happy, because they won't need to "re-fill" for a long time -- and annoying customers that call you just to check if you got an e-mail will burn through their coupons in no time.
This way, there is no explicit cost for a single phone call that can be challenged by the customer, it's simply an objective way of charging "support contacts", and it's up to the customer to minimize those contacts if they want to save money.
What constitutes a contact is up to you, but in my mind it would make sense to classify "ticket creation" (not replies) or "phone call" both as separate contacts. This also makes tickets "worth" way more than a phone call, so you incentivize people to stop calling unless absolutely necessary.
We run an enterprise saas business and at one point decided we can't work with a particular customer anymore. We informed the customer that we will terminate his service and cancel all his outstanding (unpaid) invoices.
Soon after that, the customer started to take legal action against our company. It was quite an ordeal for about 12 months. At least it helped us improve our contracts and legal processes going forward.
However, since than we are careful to vet new potential customers before we offer our software. If we feel the software isn't a good fit, we will tell the customer and work thru our concerns before signing a contract. Even if we may lose some potential customers in the process, it builds a more healthy and sustainable business.
"Avoid toxic customers." Is now part of our handbook.
This is exacerbated for big businesses because typically the sales team and the product team are not working directly together except for POCs, and the discussions that a Sales team has and a Product Team has are very different. It's not even about technical competency most of the time from the Sales Team (my experience is they usually know just about what they should for the role, and smart Sales folk know when to stop and ask instead of making promises they can't keep), but rather that typically who the Sales team talks with is not the bad customer, but higher decision makers who just get a generalized feedback from the actual bad customer within their company. The nit-picky and vicious activities are abstracted out into some more generalized and calmer statements when delivered to decision-makers/Sales, and it can be very difficult to get any traction on such bad customers.
I deal with these situations exclusively and it's time consuming and exhausting. Cheap legal threats aren't even the worst part (fun trick when you get a compensation request, just ask for detailed documentation on how they arrived at such a number; most times this is enough to shut down such requests as the number is just something they've pulled out of the air because "it sounded good" during a meeting), but instead that most of the time what you're dealing with "family problems" from these customers, and these are problems they just don't want to deal with personally.
Business is weird.
Over a month was spent caving to every inane request of this one customer and the only reason they did it was because the customer was willing to pay $250 and they were the first non-institutional paying customer so they were obsessed with getting it right.
5 figure a month contracts that were soon to start but paused due to the pandemic went unserviced so that large parts of the product could be rewritten to serve this one person as though they were the expert on what non institutional customers wanted. And in the end they wanted nothing more than a custom Craigslist type of ad, just with their own custom style and everything.
Could have spent that month protecting the large contracts.
But more often than not, the end outcome isn't favourable.
A friend of mine serviced an early user of his app during the early days with free customisations. That same user came back asking for more custom features, while being on the FREE plan, and threatened to write a 1 star review if they didn't. Toxic.
I'm going to follow up and report back.
Update: His reply - "Fired politely!"
Also early there is not enough data to know who are the bad customers or who customers who are having real problems, they all look the same.
The best way to deal with them is just to be honest: "This is not on our roadmap, yes we know issues exists. Here is link to issues forum"
Public issues forum helps a lot, because if issue doesn't have upvotes or comments, they can reason that chances for developers getting to it is nearly zero.
Especially for anything below non pure enterprise 100k+ per customer, there is no way team can address even 2% of issues if there is even hint of PMF.
Even for massive companies like Atlassian and Unity there are public feature requests that have thousands of upvotes and they just don't do them because it is not on the roadmap.
I’ve often given up at that point when I’m asked to do this.
edit: agree with the rest of your post :)
edit: I like the rest of OP's
There is a difference between people telling you there's a fire in your house vs. people telling you what furniture you should get. Bug reports and feature requests should be treated as different beasts in customer support flows.
In any case, it depends on what service you're providing or what product you're selling, whether or not the reports are high-value and would impact the success of your business, what the they're about, etc. The onus is on the company to determine these things for themselves.
The only reason I can think of for redirecting a user is if you're using it as some sort of quality control barrier to weed out the low quality and non-essential reports.
Support is very linear in nature. More issues you have, more people you need to take in feedback and act on it. For early companies with very MVP products, support can just kill them, because they will spend all day long doing support stuff vs building. By definition their products are going to be bad.
On top of that reporting issue is just 1% of work, because you actually need someone to go and reproduce that issue. If it is a feature request, then it is another massive chunk of work to spec it and even decide to do it or not to do it.
Also when you post it in the forum, it is way easier to get back to and companies will ask to login support tickets with production accout details, so they can actually go back into the logs and match that data.
Reporting bugs doesn't make someone a bad customer.
But there's a certain kind of nitpicky person you can never make happy.
When your company is young and immature, there's still a decent concentration of actionable feedback in the nitpicks. Eventually it gets harder to mine gems out of it.
A much more serious issue for us is customers who abuse our staff. And these are sometimes high-paying customers. Shouting and swearing on the phone and on site. And worse.
We've learned the hard way to recognise companies with this culture, and actively (but politely) remove ourselves. Even if it costs a significant, potential 7 figure deal.
The bottom line is that our staff are our greatest asset, not the code, and not the customer - and even one staff member leaving over a bad client is a net loss, regardless of the deal.
We haven't fired many, but we've never regretted it.
I should also point out that we differentiate individual bad behavior from company culture. Sometimes we get a different point of contact, but at some companies it's a culture where everyone does the same thing.
I'm not at all convinced that tolerating bad behaviour towards your company is ever a good strategy.
The problem is that you can’t just “fire” bad customers because you don’t want to face a lawsuit. They paid you to launch the results, and you have to be willing to do what it takes to finish development, get it launched and then go and fix the bugs. You can re-use most of that in your SAAS later.
One off projects, yep you better do everything what client says and don't forget to chase after them to pay up even if everything is done to spec.
If your customer is a business then their needs and desires are probably unique to a degree. A high-maintenance customer will mak a ton of requests that specialize your product to them only, and be little value elsewhere. If you don't know yet where that line is, that's fine. You can learn as more customers come along. But I certainly wouldn't call it being paid to build what you should be building anyway. More like being paid to operate as an independent contractor while you learn the industry.
Depends on the bug. Complaining about problems with Windows 7 or demanding good performance ancient tablets and netbooks that emulate either 32-bit X86 on ARM or ARM on 32-bit X86 and then complaining loudly in public when these things aren't supported isn't a sign of good customer.
It’s often hard to know who is a bad customer at the beginning, but once you figure it out, unless the customer is legitimately responsible for a massive part of your business, I agree, fire them. And if the bad customer is responsible for so much of your business you can’t fire them, start looking for a replacement set of customers so that you can work to do that.
I've done quite a few projects for distribution companies, these are intermediaries selling stuff on very low margins, basically warehouses with a call centre. To survive they have to become obsessive over costs. They can't turn that cost cutting mentality off even when they are buying services rather than 10 million transistors or whatever they need. This makes them thoroughly miserable places to work. Amazon is an example but on a massive scale.
I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream.
One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions)
I do sometimes wonder how much global loss in economic productivity is caused by the various payment methods that allow customers to retrospectively reverse purchases or payments with a high or certain likelihood of taking their money back and possibly also costing the merchant a fee, whether or not the customer has any legitimate basis for doing so.
Even with an extremely low chargeback rate, the amount of hassle the occasional chargeback does cause to one of my little businesses is wildly disproportionate. We are generally very keen on looking after our customers and in practice we tend to refund liberally in cases where for example there seems to have been a genuine misunderstanding on the customer's part, even if legally we have no obligation to do so. Consequently, we have a generally very positive reputation, and sometimes even people who didn't find our product was right for them turn out to be good ambassadors. I would gladly decline the probably tiny number of customers who wouldn't buy our stuff without the option to make us give their money back involuntarily in exchange for the certainty we would get, and I don't think our reputation would suffer in the slightest for it.
I can only imagine how annoying this sort of issue must be at a much larger scale, like running a fashion store in the current circumstances where most sales are online, and then encountering Rita Returner who wants to buy five new dresses every month but then always returns four of them (one or two now slightly marked and not able to be sold as new) because the law says she can and there's no way to prove she caused the marks. A friend-of-a-friend apparently saw a huge cost to their business from a situation not unlike this in recent months.
Yet we keep hearing stories about their abusive employment pradctices, even in AWS. It's in their culture to squeeze every last drop of blood out of their staff.
If you're doing serious professional work for business clients, you definitely want to charge a serious rate for it. Cheap prices attract cheap clients and all that.
On the other hand, if you're making some mobile or web app aimed at the average person in the street who happens to have a certain need or interest, your market may be extremely price-sensitive. Even quite a small increase in prices can cause a huge drop-off in conversion rates. Even quite a small decrease in prices can cause a bump in conversions that easily pays for the difference. Finding the sweet spot is something I would prioritise in any future B2C business I was starting.
From the author's note, if I paid for a lifetime service, it doesn't mean you're doing me a favor. I'm simply paying what you told me your service is worth. And if you treat me bad because I asked you to fix your broken stuff, that's just so unprofessional. If I asked you for more stuff than what the original product's scope is, you can simply let me know your consulting rates and that is almost like a small investor paying you money to build a feature for your product that's probably useful for other customers as well.
This defense against attempts at subordination is sensible and professional, but I think it is far from common thinking, in my opinion, among the non-entrepreneurial types that go into Engineering or CS. It is understanding gained for them only after decades of painful experience - if at all.
I’m a direct person, so I might say something to someone like, “I recognize that you might think that you need to do [x-behavior] in order to get attention and support; you have probably had to do that in the past to get service. I need you to understand that this won’t be successful in our working relationship and that my business will not be beholden to [x,y,z]. If we are to continue working together, we need to have very clear communication about what services are in and out of scope that we can both agree to. If we can do that, I’m happy to keep working with you and will do my best to support your needs. If we can’t, I’m happy to refer you to some places that might be a better fit.”
I totally hear you and this fear stopped us from charging extra from a toxic customer. "What if they said yes?"
Raising prices should not be a passive-aggressive move. It should be to a price sufficient to offset the downside the customer brings (perhaps by hiring dedicated staff to deal with them), not to scare them off (it may have the latter effect, which is okay, but that's not the goal.)
If you aren't happy with them saying yes at the price you've set, you've set it to low.
Simply conveying the effort and time you're expending for them (very politely), helps them appreciate your business and temper their expectations...
Nonsense. A bad customer is one that costs your company more to service than it earns back in revenue. It’s simple arithmetic.
Maybe they don’t bother to pay their bills. Maybe they run you ragged with endless change requests. Maybe they repeatedly start new projects then, just as you’ve done all the prep work, put them “on hold”. Maybe they string you along with promises of “big projects” coming down the pipeline that never actually arrive. Whatever it is, every hour you sink on them is an hour not spent on a customer that is profitable.
The article may be thin, but it’s absolutely right: get rid of those assholes ASAP, and then fix your own damn processes so you don’t get screwed again. Otherwise they’ll drag you down and drain your business for you.
How is this top in HN?
We can see similar, if less-recognized, patterns in many publications labeled as for "men", "lifetyle", "health", "technology", "news", etc.
We've been calling them "women's magazines" so long, and I assume that, before I was born, society let magazine publishers frame how we call and think of the magazine, and its implied assertions about women.
Today, with publishing opened up more, and even literal children posturing as broadcast "influencers", that some of the dynamics of publisher as often posturer, manipulator, and exploiter are more transparent to us.
I don't know how to solve this, and it seems to be many different problems. But I'm thinking that one thing we can do about it (and certainly this is far from a novel idea, including in this particular space), is to reject manipulative terms and labels that self-interested parties try to force on us.
Is it that every article/blog post has to have some "universe changing" truths in it? Quite often there is a value is in repeating old "obvious" things. Some of those obvious things are not obvious for everyone.
They tended to share a number of features.
1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources, they never had any intent to work with you on.
2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free consulting.
3) POCs on your kit, demonstrating your performance and cost superiority to other solutions, with again, promises of if the POC went well, they would purchase from you. They refused to sign a contract indicating this. And later the bought very expensive gear from a competitor (about 5x our price) which purportedly did the same thing (it didn't) at the same performance (it didn't). Later reaching out to us to ask us to help re-engineer their purchased solution (we didn't).
4) RFPs that you responded to, and according to the non-purchasing folks, you dominated and won. Later changed by the purchasing people. In one case, a university called me up on my vacation asking me to teach our competitors how to do what we did. Because they didn't want to buy our solution from us. But they wanted our solution.
Fire your bad customers. In the case of the university, we simply stopped responding them them after they pulled that crap. I'd get occasional complaints from them and others that they needed me to respond to RFPs so they could get their minimum of 3 offers to compare.
We had a non-US government purchasing entity literally change a contract on us because they could, and told us they could, without us agreeing to it.
Every single negative interaction wound up being represented in our T&Cs. After a while, some of the larger groups we dealt with complained about our T&Cs. Which weren't one sided, but they were fair to both parties. I am thankful that this provided signals of problematic customers. I'd sit down with the entities lawyers and explain every single clause and why it was there. I helped them understand what were lines what was non-negotiable.
Most reasonable entities adapted. The unreasonable ones would insist upon their own terms, which were tremendously risky for us.
Almost 4 years since the company was killed, and it's getting a bit easier to write and talk about this.
I've heard this too many times from our existing customers too. This sounds like the "do it for exposure!" line of reasoning for artists.
>2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free consulting.
We had this one customer who always called into our support line (and for some reason got ahold of my personal cell!), and every call ended up being a 2 hour-long consulting session on how to get his business set up for e-commerce and his business strategy. He's went through lots of arrogant Wordpress/website developers that I couldn't stand working with, and still hasn't had a site up after two years.
I was so relieved when he decided not to renew his service contact.
- rude customers
- customers which are not market/product fit
For rude customers, please give them benefit of the doubt: maybe they are just in a bad mood that day. Your support team needs to understand that their job is to help customers to achieve their goal (not to talk about bugs). If you get a multiple rude answers after you try to help them, just cut them (refund and ban). Do not worry about twitter and social media things: only 3% of world population reads it. Do not worry if that customer thinks they are vip (like CEO of some random ‘ycombinator’ company). The successful people are amazingly polite.
For bad market/product fit, you need to explain how your product does not fit. Sometimes it is mistake of your sales giving them impression that you can do certain things. This is a hard problem.
In short, your customers will eventually define your company: in same way as in bar/restaurant business customers eventually define type of a bar/restaurant.
Do not fear to say 'No!' and do not try to be everyone's darling.
I had to learn this the hard way because of exactly the same eagerness to do business and take up on all opportunities.
My advice is to regularly reflect on your (business) relationships and evaluate them (good, ok, bad) and sort out everyone who just gives you more pain than value.
Of course 'value' in business is not only profit but also a good relationship to your customer and wanting to do the job rather than wanting to do another one. In personal life 'value' can be that someone accepts you as you are and/or tells you their honest opinion even if you do not like what you hear.
You will have to define your own meaning of 'value' to evaluate these relationships.
Make sure that fee is a healthy one that will either make them go away or make the effort worth it for you.
Win/win.
Reminds me of Aesop's "Please all and you please none" moral (but applied in a modern-day context to a customer base):
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/648/the-man-the-...
So the title should really be “get rid of customers who are bad for the business,” which is self evident.
What's usually missing from that line of reasoning is the opportunity cost of supporting that one customer instead of five others that are more average in demand.
There is an argument to be made that for a smaller/normal customer, the power balance between corporation and customer is about equal. Both have the right to fire each other and if the customer is toxic or takes more time to support than could be focused on something else, you should fire them.
But the power dynamic changes once you start talking about big money. If you have a client that is responsible for 3/4 of your revenue, toxicity or not, firing them is easier said than done. And the bigger clients (FAANG types) know this too. There, I think the trick is to try to make the statement of work as clear as possible.
The one thing about a FAANG client to remember is that not all accounts are created equal. If it’s not a six figure contract, just because you have a deal with someone from Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net doesn’t mean they can’t be fired.
(It also doesn’t mean they have huge money or that your sales team can extort them. I had a podcast hosting provider try to upsell my zero-budget initiative into an enterprise plan my insanely low-volume podcast didn’t need by half-threatening to cut us off, just because I worked at a large media company. Needless to say, I fired them.)
If you are willing to work like crazy to keep someone happy for whatever reason go for it but it might be that you are putting out a fire that is not worth putting out. Weigh up the opportunity cost and see what you want to do then.
That’s not a bad customer. They may be a tough and unpleasant one, but as long as they’re bringing in more money for your company than you’re paying out to support them, you’re solid†. The bad ones are the ones who land you in the red for your trouble.
--
† Of course, if you can find yourself other customers who’ll generate more revenue for less pain, by all means cut the ballaches loose just as soon as you contractually can. That’s just good business.
- "I do not have the time to do XYZ, sorry"
- "It would cost me too much to do XYZ, sorry"
- "This framework does not support XYZ, sorry"
These are conversation stoppers. As opposed to:
- "I think this goes beyond the scope of our agreement"
- "What you are asking is very difficult"
However it is very easy for your employees to misinterpret outraged customer behaviour after firing some of the bad ones. When they think it is a bad customer, they always handle them well, communicate professionally and nicely, and THEN they come to YOU that YOU DECIDE and do something about it. Not them. These occasions are perfect to show them how to distinguish between relevant outrage and a bad client who has a tantrum. If you miss this, your guys can become demotivated by mistake.
Further some of the examples are terrible. If, for instance, you've made multiple product changes for a free customer, the problem isn't that the free customer exists, it's that you didn't have any check early on against doing that.
"Can you change this for me?" "No." Alternately, "Sure, that would be $2750 up front"
Etc.
Customers bothering you on WhatsApp? Again, maybe the customer isn't the problem...