Ask HN: How to handle pathological customers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to handle pathological customers?

21 pointstlogan8 comments

We have problem in our bootstrapping business. Occasionally, or better to say more often than we would like, we run into 'pathological customers'. We wonder what is the best way to deflect and handle these kind of customers. Basically, in our case, 'pathological customers' which do the following:

- they complain that "something is not working" or "have problem understanding" in order to extent free trial

- they complain about performances (everything is slow)

- if they pay, they pay the lowest plan ($4/month in our case) and only monthly plan but they require constant attention

- very often they want to use the service in different way that it is meant to be used

- in general they are not our target market (i.e., mainly geeks)

We looked our Streak history (btw, excellent CRM plugin for Gmail) and found that majority of emails/complains come from that kind of customers.

We want to have good customer support but we think we spent too much time on 'pathological customers' and too little working with our target customer segment.

In short, how to 'fire customer' but still be nice.

offer a refund and an apology, and close the account. If you can't come up with a genuine apology, just do the refund. Just make it clear that you are closing the account with the refund. (I mean, don't just close the account, say something like "If you don't think the service is suited to your needs, we can give you a full refund and close the account"

If they do find genuine problems (and being slow is a genuine problem, even if the slowness is in some other part of the network, it's your problem.) apologise in a genuine manner. If you can explain why you made that choice (for example, hosting your servers far away from the customer) that helps, too.

The cheaper the customer is, the more pleasing the refund will be to them. And even non-cheap customers seem to respect you for the refund, if you take the attitude "I don't need to charge people that aren't getting value out of my service" of course, if the user isn't getting value out of the service, the user doesn't need to keep using the service.

On top of that, it's very important to clearly define what you will and won't do for the customer.

I've spent most of my career in e-commerce and I've dealt with these people for years. Your best recourse is to get rid of them, quickly. Seriously. Why allow them to drain your resources when they could be draining your competitor's instead?

Back in the day, I worked for a large e-commerce company. We started a project to track customer value. Simplified, customer value = total_purchases - (total_returns * return_processing_cost_factor) . We had customers who had made dozens of purchases but had negative value to us because they returned almost everything they ordered. We wanted to keep free, no-hassle returns but these people were abusing us. The only solution? Get rid of them as quickly as possible. We discussed--half seriously--giving them gift certificates to competitors and even closing their accounts. There are plenty of less-harsh methods, too. We talked about identifying their Caller ID when they called customer service to make a return and intentionally putting them on hold for a little bit longer.

Since you aren't really an e-commerce company, your solution will be different. Figure out a metric for customer value and act on that metric. Whether it's discontinuing service, or moving them to slower servers, or de-prioritizing their customer service inquiries, look for ways to gently encourage them to go elsewhere.

You can't feel too badly about this. There are some real leeches out there, happy to bleed you dry and maximize their benefits while minimizing your profits. These people ruin good things for everyone else.

Try setting up a forum, and create a support section that is only available to paid users above a threshold. When your pathological customers try to email you can nicely point towards your forum and say sorry, you are not the support team but they are welcome to ask questions on the proper forum. If they want to upgrade to access support, then you'll at least be making some money for your time. Use a private support email or token system if you can for your paid users. I've seen a company use Twilio and OpenVBX with a custom module, where paid customers get a number to access phone support, otherwise they get a voicemail saying 'buy support to call us'.

Raise your prices until they leave. Give them a 30 day notice before raising the prices. Enjoy your new found peace.

Don't explain anything to them. No tutorials. Nothing. These people can't be taught.

You could use this as an opportunity to develop some good tutorials or similar. Also, people like that tend to be emotionally needy more than anything else. Emotionally needy people tend to want attention. If you can email back a link to a tutorial instead of doing personal handholding, they will start going elsewhere for their addictive little emotional crap. The trick is to be genuinely helpful with the technical issue (so they don't have a new excuse to be wrapped around the axle about you) while not feeding their sick need for attention.

(This was me at one time: Desperate housewife with chronic health problems -- and often heavily medicated to boot!, so lots of trouble focusing on the task at hand. Customer support hated me and often lacked the savvy to discourage my long tangents they did not want to hear.)

This. Documentation will become your best friend. Treat every new inquiry as an opportunity to create a mini-tutorial. With some doctoring up, you can usually use the guts of emails you've sent to clients in the past. These don't have to be lengthy or detailed, just a quick, basic step-by-step on how to handle the most common tasks and issues that may come up. As your documentation builds up over time, dealing with these people will become easier. Instead of writing out the same responses over and over, you thank the customer for writing and give them a link to the appropriate article. Eventually you can train most them to try looking at your documentation first and limit the inquiries coming in to more serious issues.

What percentage of your customers is this? If it is 1% then you probably want to refund them and close the account. If it is 20% then your company is the problem. Or you are missing an opportunity to address a different need.

Are these people who are just causing problems or just want things other than what you are providing? Those are two different problems with two different answers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com