How we turned angry users into our biggest fans

blog.fiplab.com

3 points·n9com··4 comments

Great post, but I feel that in the first email you sort of got lucky. The guy owned up to his mistake and realized how hasty he was with his first message. Not every customer will equally mature. He asked for a refund. You ignored that point. Even if it was the customer's fault, you should offer a refund when asked.

On a side note, great job on using your blog to promote your startup.

PS: Why did you delete the previous submission that had already several points?

Thanks dude, from experience, a lot of angry customers change their tune after they receive a quick and helpful response. This was just one particular example.

As for auto-refresh, we couldn't do this as it would trigger TfL abuse systems.

(I pinged a few friends to up vote, and the post disappeared from the new list, so I deleted and resubmitted).

I completely agree with your ethos here - my only question is: how scalable is this?

Its fine for the odd customer, but what if your user-base suddenly changes by a couple of orders of magnitude?

For our cycle app alone, we have 300k downloads and at least several thousand active users per day (when it's not raining).

Scaling is definitely an issue if you're getting a lot of complaints, but this is certainly great early on when each 'fan' (or hater) of your product can have a significant impact.

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