Comment by semireg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by semireg | Hacker News Reader

I handle 100% of my indie app's email and telephone (yes, telephone!) support. My app is designing/printing labels. Printers in general, and label printers specifically are awful and inconsiderate robots, unable to perform the simplest printing job when you need it most.

Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be. If you can show them the light, if you can "flip" these users, they will become your most loyal customers.

I start by telling them, "Hey, every month I get a call like yours where you are so frustrated you want to scream, and let me tell you a secret, if I got a call every day like this... I'd quit this business, but calls like yours are rare and I want to help you through this."

Boom. They're listening, and they're often listening to advice they don't want to hear. What kind of advice? Oh... like, "you will have to work through this and tweak the measurements until it works, because some printer drivers are mysterious and terrible. But once you get it, you'll be rewarded with it working for a long time until you have to buy a new printer."

Still, 50/1000 seems high to me, I like to think I earn the trust of 90% of my nasty/mean customers. Sometimes I'm lucky and I just paste a URL to a FAQ. After 4 years in business I had my first person hang up on me because they kept demanding a simple answer and I would say, "sorry, it's more complicated than that, I don't have a simple answer... I just have two complex answers that contradict each other until you can choose which one is the lesser of two evils."

It could be a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Label Printing

A quick video of my app Label LIVE, narrated by yours truly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnqUP1CZd24

My experience (e-commerce) is similar to this.

A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem.

Of course, there are still those people who just want an excuse to be a cunt (maybe 1% or less, from my experience). I don't push them too hard to reach a solution, and just graciously accept the money they've paid me as an admission fee for what they actually wanted - an excuse to feel righteous when they smear shit on the walls.

> A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem.

I occasionally get rude customer service emails at my startup, and in nearly every case the person apologizes after receiving a personal reply (from the founder, in my case) within 24 hours.

In many cases, the customer actually becomes an advocate for us. Once they understand that what they want (to be able to use our text enhancement within Kindle/gdocs/iBooks/Nook) is not something that my startup can do on its own, they will offer to reach out to the relevant BigCo and ask for them to build an integration.

Basically, people who will take the effort to reach out to complain to me are more likely to be willing to reach out to another company as well.

75% convert.

25% are just rude forever.

I have had to fire a few aholes from my SaaS. They would ask a question, get an answer, do the wrong thing, then call my support team member profanities. So I just refund their last bill and delete their account, and send them to a specific competitor I don’t like.

Genius idea to kill two birds with one stone.

>>> and send them to a specific competitor I don’t like.

:-)

Honestly I'm often this customer (the one that flips 180 - not the one who wants to be a cunt!)

It's quite strange. Maybe it's because I have in the past drafted kind and considerate support requests only to be met with an incomprehensible response that's not related to what I said. Getting a genuine response is a pleasant surprise.

I think this is simple selection bias. People who reach out are going to be rather motivated (frustrated).

Consider that calling customer support often takes 30 minutes of being on hold and then talking to someone with no power to help you. People are generally do everything they can to figure it out on their own.

I did tech support for a few years and probably answered 100k calls or so. I would estimate that less than 1% of people were unreasonable. 2-3% were mean people. 80% were kind. It's a hard job and you have to focus on the good.

Yes, tech support can be difficult and it seems like your statistics are similar to ours. We receive around 5,000 support tickets per day and we simply cannot satisfy everyone. Sometimes we have to "fire" a customer who becomes disrespectful towards one of our attendants.

> Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be.

Yours is a wonderful comment and you must be a very empathetic person.

Sadly, the vast majority of people tend to have just enough empathy to get by (we definitely are outliers!) and have a really hard time understanding that the very mean person most probably just had a terrible, terrible day or week, and lashed out on you. Yeah, it sucks and it is non excusable, but we all go through the worst days of our lives eventually.

In my experience it is wrong to assume that 5% of people are nasty, like the article says. It's a sad view of the world. 5% of people are currently blinded by life that has just shit upon them, and patience and a little selflessness would calm them down, and maybe, make their shitty day even better. And if they are complaining about something, whatever their attitude, there is probably something wrong that needs your attention.

Sociopaths exists but they are very rare, and often they just want to go about their day, not caring much about you to do anything good or bad.

I just wanted to say that's a nice little app you've created. I watched the full demo and it was great.

Fwiw, printers bring out the worst in me, too.

Likewise. I tense up before I print anything, and usually end up shouting every time I try to print something at home. Horrible things!

I am at the point in my life where I have a shitty broken printer that I'm still not getting rid of, because at least I am aware of all the ways it is broken and shitty and how to fix them or work around them.

PC Load Letter! WTF does that mean!?!

you have great voice and annunciation. They go long way!

Thanks! Just think, my voice is just one call away… so long as I’m not changing a diaper or cooking dinner.

Damn, that demo looks awesome! Congrats on building the one and only truly polished piece of software in the entire print/label space.

So the questions then are: of the 5% who are rude, how many are whales, and how convertible are they?

Great little app you’ve got there, enjoyed your video!

> I handle 100% of my indie app's email

Same.

> Still, 50/1000 seems high to me

Same.

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