The $4 Million Complaint Call
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Like Bob, she was new to computers. I spent 10 hours over 2 days walking her thru the basics of using a computer so she could use our insurance company software. She was very thankful.
So thankful she sent me a box containing ... two giant Idaho potatoes, nearly a foot long each.
I said it wasn't small potatoes.
It is true. One potato was enough to supply all the mashed tubers for the extended-family Thanksgiving dinner. Bonus: we happened to grow a ginormous beet of comparable size, used at the same huge meal.
It's great advice because word of mouth is extremely important for a technical business selling to a small but lucrative market where buyers have alternatives (like hiring decisions). This will have less impact in large consumer sales where advertising matters, or when you have a market cornered.
It will work when you apply for a job or hire someone. You're selling to a small market - the few employers you speak with. They have some alternatives, but if someone they know and trust (Bob, in this story) raves about you from first-hand experience, it matters quite a lot. Likewise if someone tells me how awesome it is to work with a particular person or group, I am much more likely to take that job among competitive alternatives. Treat your employees like crap and all you'll get are crap new employees, etc.
We don't all run businesses in small lucrative markets. But we do all apply to jobs from time to time, where previously helped or pissed off people will make a huge difference.
The comment below at this time ('survivorship bias') is also correct, but only if it's interpreted as a touching anecdote rather than as crucial customer-behavior information for his market segment. Understanding the dynamics of how your customers make their purchasing decisions seems like a better lesson to take from this.
(Not the same for every product, either! E.g., my being passionate about Cheerios does nothing for General Mills, really...)
I think it's still worthwhile to think about systems of people in terms of their aggregate actions as well as in terms of each being an individual.
I'm all about the "Don't kiss others' booties on the off chance that it will come back to you" because if you're doing it for that reason, you're doing it wrong.
Just treat people well, take everything one step at a time, and look at it from their vantage point. These things in mind and everyone will walk away from the table happy the majority of the time.
If your customer service reps are trained, mature and willing then there's no difference between the experience with them and you.
You can only take so many steps each day. Forfeit too many steps for some guy who won't pay off and you lose out.
This article's true evil is this: He puts helping the guy with a technical problem as a favor, not as a simple kind duty.
We don't want to spend everyday as tech support, that's reasonable. But if people were better educated instead of taken care of, perhaps they wouldn't need as much.
However, when you're running a business, especially during its infancy, your values need to be questionable and questioned in order for your approach to adapt to the environment. Following questionable values in this case is not only admissible but even required, and you'll need to reinvent yourself quite often. There is no "normal" when you're trying to break the mould.
Definite upvote from me for bringing this up.
It's a question of economics: you simply can't bend over backwards for all customers, in all lines of business, without going bust. Silly example: if I walk into a hardware store and buy a nail, and then proceed to waste an hour of the salesperson's time, that's a loss to them. Perhaps they'll make it back if I come back again and again and buy other things, but it's something that each business has to determine.
Now a better example would be consumer electronics. It's expensive, most people don't know what they really want they read some review in engadget, and the margins on the name brand stuff is extremely low ($5-10, on Sony TVs for example).
Had Bob been a jerk and constantly harassed the support staff with problems that were of his own making, then I'd have gotten rid of him. Probably. There could be circumstances.
Anecdote time: I worked at an SaaS company. 1 customer was constantly flooding our system via an automated system he had written. It caused quite a lot of downtime and breakage. And he was a jerk.
My bosses hated him. He was nothing but a pain in their necks. I loved him. He constantly stressed out our system and showed me the bottlenecks. I used it to fix all kinds of problems years before they became a problem for other customers. Any time he caused a problem, we'd lock his account, fix it, and then unlock him again. Sometimes days later.
Eventually, he caused enough problems that they dumped him.
Fast forward years later, and now our regular customers were using the system as hard as he was. Many of them. Now, if the system broke, we had no spare capacity. Everything was harder to fix.
I will probably never forget his name and the lesson I learned about how useful a 'bad' customer can be.
You could luck out, and that time you spent with a single customer could end up like this, with a $4 million check. Or that call might go nowhere, and because you've neglected other parts of your business and your other customers to cater to the extensive needs of a few, you may find your entire venture collapsing.
There are arguments to be made around where this line should be drawn, but helping each and every customer with all of their problems — even when they are unrelated to your actual product or service — is too far in one direction.
EDIT: At the end the article points out that not all calls can be treated this, but that "you never know" which should. But, "some things are really important but there's know way to know which", is not helpful in any useful sense.
This isn't "gambling with your time" this is "making good on your customer's commitment". And your note triggered a really interesting visceral reaction in me.
You can look at life as a series of choices you make and a scoring system by which you evaluate the quality of those choices. Typically a positive scoring system is used so the higher the score the 'better' the decision. It is often the case that people are judged by their scoring system.
Examples of scoring systems might be "how much money did I get out of that decision?" or "How many people are better off based on that decision?" These being centered on the individual describe the 'greedy bastard' archetype and the 'saint' archetype. Most people have a more nuanced system which combines the scores of several systems (is this good for my company? my career? my personal wealth? my celebrity? my family? my community?) which they weight sort of like the ice skating scoring system in the Olympics.
The point of the article was that if you're committed to your company and your company's success, then you decide to do what ever it takes to solve your customer's problems. That is because they took a chance on your product and you want them to be ok with their choice. Its an anecdotal story which illustrates a principle, of customer focused execution.
When you look at successful companies, you will see that they share this principle. And companies that do not, can be disrupted (like the US car industry in the 70's, the airline industry in the 80's, etc etc). There isn't any gambling involved. Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win. That customer will relate that experience, win, they continue to buy your products, win, and they stick with you if you accidentally screw up somehow, total win.
There may be companies/products/sites (say Facebook) where responding to every customer gripe is not feasibly addressable (or even valid). However, most of the world works in terms of products and services. You want to delight and provide your customers with the help you can (and more often than not, it will pay off).
In terms of scale, take Apple while Steve Jobs was active. For every amusing one liner email that made it into the blogs/news, I suspect there was many more that were contacted by executive customer support for assistance. Was it Steve responding to each and every person? No, but he did care about quality and there were multiple situations where a letter about an unusual circumstance resulted in customers getting good service.
The market around products like the one in the article are generally tight, most people know each other, etc. In this case, the founder/ceo was able (and committed) to handling the situation. In bigger market opportunities, an organization with a good support staff will likely attract more business over time than one without.
> Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win.
I don't think that anyone actually adopts this position. You would probably not become a kidney donor for your customer, or pay them $10,000 because they confess to you in a support call that they recently became unemployed. You would not build a new software application just for them. You would not even add a feature to the product just for one customer! (At least at the consumer software level.)
It's fine to make exaggerated statements because our society requires exaggerated change. But there is a big difference between saying that Time Warner, AT&T, et. al., need to get better about customer service, vs saying that patio11 or Peldi do.
I guess the fundamental problem I have with your position is that you are preaching a message that lots of people in Fortune 500s should hear (and won't), to a group of people that are probably treating their customers too well already, and are perhaps feeling guilty that they do not do even more for them, and are thus primed to further the error. So in that specific sense, I think this advice is dangerous.
A much better approach would be to advocate a scoring system that takes into account more of the actual benefit of customer service, e.g. realistically estimating the marketing benefits, considering the product feedback benefits, and so on. The value of customer support may vary greatly with the kind of market you are in, for example.
This comment: "I don't think that anyone actually adopts this position. You would probably not become a kidney donor for your customer, or pay them $10,000 because they confess to you in a support call that they recently became unemployed. You would not build a new software application just for them. You would not even add a feature to the product just for one customer! (At least at the consumer software level.)" seems a bit like reductio ad asurdum right? Of course you wouldn't donate a kidney. The argument goes you solve their problems that are blocking their use of your product. In the anecdote the customer Bob didn't have quite the computer skills they needed, but those skills were essential to being able to run the product platform. So our author helped them develop those skills. Note that this person has already paid for and bought the product so they are already a customer.
"I guess the fundamental problem I have with your position is that you are preaching a message that lots of people in Fortune 500s should hear (and won't), to a group of people that are probably treating their customers too well already, and are perhaps feeling guilty that they do not do even more for them, and are thus primed to further the error. So in that specific sense, I think this advice is dangerous."
I disagree with that too, consider the AirBnB case of the customer who had her apartment trashed. That was a case where a non-fortune 500 company initially took the position of 'do what is best to protect the company', got a ton of criticism for it, and then turned around and focused more on making the customer whole before counting costs on the company. The latter was much more successful, and AirBnB has remained a steadily growing company. And they learned from that experience both how to be more customer focused and how to protect themselves in the future. If you have one customer, or ten, or ten thousand, every time you help one of them through a problem of using your product your company and your product gets better.
There are some great examples of great customer service in many YC companies and amongst folks here. There are also some less than great examples.
Then you finish with this, "... to a group of people that are probably treating their customers too well already, and are perhaps feeling guilty that they do not do even more for them, and are thus primed to further the error." which completely jumps off the rails. Small companies are busy places, and if the customers aren't having problems then generally they aren't taking any resources away. Its good to periodically poll them and ask how they are doing but there is never a risk of deciding to go just go out looking for customer problems to solve, if the company is focused on getting the product out the door.
So I started at Sun on the Monday after they went public. They were still a pretty small company < 2000 employees they were not a fortune 500 company yet, but they were very customer focused. I joined Network Appliance the Monday after their first layoff in their history, they weren't a fortune 500 company yet, but they were customer focused. My point is that being customer focused isn't something you 'add on' when you get big, it is something you 'build in' when you are small and you nurture. I strongly believe it contributes to the success probability.
That's because the grandparent's claim is absurd. Grandparent was actually claiming that you should do anything for a customer. I'm not exaggerating its position at all; that's actually what grandparent said. Absurd position yields absurd counterargument.
With AirBnB, you have an example of one small company that needed to hear the customer service message. But one example is not much of an argument when somebody posits a general trend.
I can defend the trend easily: a small company depends much more on customer service than a large one does. The first group of customers is make-or-break; once you reach a certain funding level, pleasing every single customer is less of an issue.
> Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win.
While this may be true, the fact remains that you have a limited amount of time. As a matter of reality, you simply cannot spend an infinite amount of time with every customer.
My original point was that, given that you have this limited amount of time, it is important to intelligently decide how to divide it among multiple customers and priorities — rather than simply spending inordinate amounts of time with single customers because they ask for it.
Perfect. This captures in a single sentence the trap you can get yourself into here.
Lets start with the obvious, if your product is so impossible to use that you need infinite customer support hours with every customer in order to use it, well you need to pick a different line of work right?
But lets start with the assumption that you make a fine product and customers like it. The reality is that every product has to teach the customer how to use it at some level, from the simple picture on your electric toothbrush telling you to plug in the base and put the toothbrush into the base, to a description of effects various tools achieve in Photoshop.
You 1) sell the product, 2) customer buys it, 3) learns it, 4) uses it.
Its up to your marketing department to get the customer between steps 1 and 2, its up to your support to get them between 3 and 4. Every time you have to help a customer between steps 3 and 4, if you feed that back into the product (design, documentation, execution) you mitigate the future chance of hitting that problem with another customer. Unless your product is infinitely complex (see my first point) then, like a legal contract that has grown to 6 pages because of the clauses that deal with each problem that came before, the amount of time you need to spend with customers goes down. What is more amazing is that new customers benefit from all the work you've put into making the product easy to use and they share that as 'delight' with their peers, who bring in more customers.
This is the truth in this anecdote, you have a limited amount of time to succeed and every time you spend that time with a customer, helping to solve their problems with using your product, you gain much more time down the road. And you gain expertise in designing products in the future. If you read that discussion about the difference between 'years of experience' vs 'knowledge' this is it, in a nutshell. You as an entrepreneur become more valuable knowing about problems that customers will have, you as a company become more valuable because people learn to trust you, and your products become more valuable because all of that knowledge gets folded into them. There is no gamble here. There is no 'wasted' time. It is all useful time well spent, assuming you bring back the knowledge and incorporate it into your culture, and your products.
Every interaction you have with a customer impacts your brand. Sometimes you win the lottery. Other times you don't. But I'd much rather err on the side of giving a fuck. Anything less is revolting to me, both as a customer and as someone whose bills are paid by the existence of customers.
If you sell something, the customers are your job.
this is true even if the specific problems bob was having (windows startup options) had superficially nothing to do with their software - if you take a step back, they were all things he needed to do to get their product up and running properly, and were therefore worth taking a look at to see if things could be made easier for the next customer.
Meanwhile, at the other companies where CEO was too sleepy to make good decisions because he was up all night helping customers configure Windows... well, we don't hear those stories, because they folded.
Edited to add: not to denigrate what he did here. He did a nice thing, and it's laudable to be a good person who helps people, whether or not it's the optimal way to spend your time.
Most of the time, the "best" possible outcome with these customers is you'll be held responsible for all their IT problems as an unpaid technician, and the worst would be they'll use patience with their entire computing setup and take it all out on you. The odds of Bob-type users damaging or even destroying a small company are vastly greater than anything else that could happen.
Think of it as beta testing or customer-focused design that you are getting paid to do.
"We would have chosen to go with ACME Technologies, but when we had challenges with the installation their staff was so tied up offering Windows tutorials that we could never get the help we needed to do a proper implementation. It's a shame as their product did appear to have the edge."
I used to work for a company that worked in sleep medicine, so we had the wonders of a busy night call schedule. Our CEO boasted of our support record (wilfully ignoring actual data) and would demand to know why we didn't do a 2am drive to a customer having difficulties like he did back when he was operating the business out of his garage. It didn't slow him down much when we pointed out that the lab having problems was literally on the other side of the continent.
Support is a bit like healthcare - there is always more demand than there is supply. The trick is how to triage it appropriately.
A bank was going to turn down an account for some long-haired young man in jeans who wanted his statements forwarded all over the place. Then some young employee told the middle-aged manager he was a wealthy rock star who needed his bank statements available while touring.
Some young bank teller with an attitude was being an ass to a guy in coveralls or similar, covered in paint and looking kind of like a day laborer. He finally got mad and said he would move his accounts if he did not get treated properly. She continued with the attitude and told him "Go ahead". He was the owner of a construction company and his accounts were worth millions. (Edit: And, yes, he moved them.)
Also, getting a bookkeeper to handle this sort of thing (including bill payments) is trivial, and scheduling a flurry of different addresses which depend on when the statements are mailed, the efficiency of the postal system, and various tour dates seems very shaky.
I turned 47 yesterday. Some of my anecdotes are no doubt older than some of the members of this forum.
Peace.
If you don't set boundaries with your clients, they will set them for you. Which means calling the CEO at 2 AM on a Saturday.
The sentiment of always respecting your clients is a good one, but allowing yourself to get roped in on issues that you shouldn't is a surefire path to burnout and losing money.
[Grainy photograph of photocopied email with effusive praise from the Purchasing Director at a Midwestern life insurance company, which had just opened a $300,000 a year account with us, about his purchasing experience with $COMPANY.]
Bob is talking about the $22.69 order he made of balloons for his daughter's birthday. Treat every order like Cindy treated that one. Keep up the good work. -- CEO
My only takeaway from this is if you want orders to be taken from CEOs by pleasent happy people, hire pleasant, happy people to work for you.
Is that what you meant?
Working in seasonal order entry is a very cruddy job, by the way, but I'll give it to $COMPANY: they genuinely believed and practiced all the words that everyone repeats about customer satisfaction.
It's shockingly rare to get good proactive customer service nowadays that by giving it a little attention, you can easily give yourself a competitive advantage of your entire industry.
If it was so lucrative to take calls at 2AM, why don't they offer that kind of service after anymore?
:{-
In the end I had to tell them that no, I actually wanted the original logo that we sent them, but the whole thing was kind of amusing.
Joel said it best: Remarkable Customer Service, as in service so good that people actually remark about it.
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
Every page in our app has a "Help" button, our About page has my phone number on it, our error dialog has a button to contact support. We love when people contact us.
To be honest, as much as I enjoy talking to customers, this is just good business, for tons of reasons:
- people won't pay if it mysteriously doesn't work, no matter whose fault it is
- customer development is essential to a startup, and this creates opportunities to talk to customers (when you're done, have a chat, don't just sign off)
- when something is wrong with your service, you have a personal connection to people who want you to succeed - so they tell you the problem instead of letting you accidentally lose customers.
- customers with whom you have a personal connection become your biggest advocates.
It certainly costs money and time to do this, but I don't think I'm going to regret it.
Their staff are ignorant, their process is incoherent, their documentation is incorrect or misleading, the tools their customer service staff use are broken.
I will shoot myself through the hand before I give GoDaddy a nickel. In fact, I would probably shoot myself through the hand if someone told me I needed to call GoDaddy support.
For my own projects, I will happily pay the extra 30-40% to a company that is not disgustingly incompetent.
I'm sorry to correct this, I really am. To provide apple as an example of how the 'bob' issue scales. It isn't about treating customers with respect, it's about treating the customer better than the competitor. Your competitor may respect the customer, as does you. How do you differentiate? If you're aiming for higher cost you need to go better quality of service.
I was in a meeting the other day and I spoke candidly to the customer about differences between our penetration test reports and most others. At the end of the day it boils down to relationships and the investment in them. The customer might not be aware they're paying for that, but that's a factor in every business. For us, that means we invest more in relationships and doing things our customers want than publishing research at conferences on the vulnerability du jour. Does it make us less known? Yes. Does it make us less loved? No. I find it hard to believe that there are many companies that have used us and thought, "There was an average company", and that's why bob thought the guys in TFA were so good. It wasn't that they were actually good, it was that they exceeded expectations, which is the goal we should all aim for.
This is one of the reasons that is hard to adopt the "80/20, walk the difficult customer" approach; I have seen the right manager turn a bad client into a good one too many times. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Yes, customer support has a cost. So does marketing and getting customer feedback as part of an MVP process. While I cringe when customers are demanding, I also realize how valuable it can be. But I make sure they pay their bills as well. And if I have a support contract, I make sure they buy it -- even if they squeeze the value of that to the last drop.
This is an example of why you just might not want to do that.
I love customers that need extra help because I discover all kinds of things that can be improved with my products and I usually gain insight into a whole demographic that I didn't previously understand.
This is a great attitude, and unfortunately quite rare in the dev community. It's very difficult to see what is cumbersome about a UI if you have been navigating cumbersome UIs your entire life.
But then there are Bobs.
Being extra nice to customers doesn't preclude to using some common sense.
While some people are sharp enough to see around the corners and figure out the end game not everybody is.
I always appreciate a company that has top rate customer service.
Amazon.com is the best example I can think of these days.
Comcast is the worst.
I used to enjoy this type of article, now the thought process is about the likelihood of it happening to your company.
This situation paid off, however you never know if the directors or companies may have discovered the business through other means.
I know this all sounds cynical but it's a careful balance of sensibility.
The blog poster's dream world: we have randomly lucked out by having a single annoying customer who we stuck with against better judgement, and the frog turned out to be the prince six months after we cupped its balls on a Sunday at 2 am.
In reality: if you spend your time indulging annoying customers there's a 99.9999999% chance they'll just keep being annoying customers. You will piss off everyone at your company for indulging in the annoying customers' ridiculous requests, and if you're on my support team I will fire you, because you have better things to do, such as supporting people that respect the privacy of people they do not know.
If Bob called me at 2 am, there's a non-zero probability the outcome would be him having a lot of bad words to spread about me. You know what? It's probably worth it, because I don't want good word of mouth spread by people clueless enough to call me at 2 in the morning. My experience here? In over a decade of working freelance, therefore needing a new job every several weeks, I've never had bad word of mouth stop me from getting a job. And I have had to shut down a lot of Bobs, quite often in a fiery fireball of very, very satisfying fury. In retrospect, most Bobs have never amounted to much at all, and I often wonder why I hadn't cut them off much earlier. Think Bob would have stood up in that meeting, and said, "oh yeah, totally go with those guys you plan to, because that one company you're not thinking of using wouldn't speak to me at 2 am"?