The $4 Million Complaint Call (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The $4 Million Complaint Call (2012)

inc.com

148 pointssolaris15200032 comments

Nice story. I generally agree the message, particularly the concept and phrase of an "internal champion". As demonstrated that one person can make or break you.

I've witnessed similar situations play out more than once, but to the negative with bad service aimed at seemingly insignificant people killing six and seven figure orders.

That said, I think you're missing something if the potential windfall is your impetus for quality service.

"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." —Malcolm S. Forbes [0]

0: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/28/judge-character/

Is it [largely] factual? I couldn't work it out quickly as it's told in first person but the tag line and mini-resume doesn't mention anything that suggests the writer writes radio broadcasting software.

The third para from the end suggests it's at least somewhat fictionalised.

+++

Oh, found this http://www.bsiusa.com/about/about.php (seems Burley didn't know much about trademarks when he set out?).

Edit: Also http://www.paulneevel.com/hp_archive/070830ronburley.html.

If you value feedback from the HN collective then you probably should read the extensive discussion from the last time this was submitted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081390

There are many points and counter-points there, with more anecdotes, and some data.

Comments there are closed, of course, it being so old, so any new discussion will have to be here.

I suspect it is simpler, they don't care about HN's feedback.

A simple check of the account would suggest that they needed a bit of karma, their submission of the Hudsonreed site was DOA (as most, 'create an account, submit a site' type submissions are). They haven't made any comments to get karma that way, so they use the 'other' well known karma farming technique, scrape HN for past stories that were popular and re-submit them at the 'right' time. It has become enough of a signal that I suspect pg could add it into his heuristics for spammers.

Actually someone at work shared it on Yammer and I thought people here might like it. I didn't realise Karma was of any value to be farmed. Sorry for... trying to share things?

I'm also missing out on the karma awards program. Where do I sign up?

I was reading his comment, rolled my eyes and then felt stupid because I figured there was a /sarcasm tag at the end. There wasn't, so the eye rolling was justified.

/r/KarmaConspiracy

I probably need a /cynic tag for days like today.

Haha, that's ok. I have days like that too.

Welcome to HN.

It is a pretty popular web site with a part of the technical crowd. It gets analyzed a lot [1][2]. It also gets a lot of 'spam' (since coverage on the front page of HN can send you lots of traffic [3][4][5]) HN "scores" its participants using a counter 'karma' [6] which also affects features visible to your account (well at least the down vote button) And with any 'score' there are people who score more than others [7]. And where there is scoring there is competition.

The bottom line is that certain behaviors emerge for people who actively try to achieve a 'high score' (more karma) and people who are trying to achieve 'viriality'[8] (more exposure).

It was unkind of me to point out the behavior (usually I just note it and ignore it) and for that I apologize.

Colin (grandparent posting) has a 'thing' about stuff that gets doubly or triply or more posted. I understand the annoyance, it can get annoying. But I've also noted that he posts a lot of links :-) A number of people tend to complain when their version of the link doesn't make it to the front page when someone else's done (it's a 'I'm not getting that karma whine') And generally harmless (other than it sometimes back fires and they get down voted for whining)

[1] http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analys...

[2] http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall

[3] http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/05/26/hacker-news-and-driv...

[4] http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/lessons-learned...

[5] http://pitchpigeon.com/blog/10-lessons-learned-from-a-succes...

[6] http://pitchpigeon.com/blog/10-lessons-learned-from-a-succes...

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

[8] Not exactly a word, but my definition would be the rate at which things spread, especially on the Internet.

OK thanks for the welcome and explanation. I'll check my next submission is original before I post it next time. I've lurked here for quite a while and have enjoyed the content. Although it is harder to understand the rules compared to somewhere like Digg. Better content though.

If you're new and haven't become enculturated, there may be value in your reading jacquesm's unofficial FAQ:

http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ

Bits of it are a little out-of-date, and there are some things it hasn't caught up with, but it's mostly right, and some people find it useful.

Hey, I had not seen it before and I enjoyed the read. So don't worry about it, and thanks for submitting.

I like this story. I have provided this level of support in the past and it made me proud. But beware the lesson you learn from this "$4m call" story.

The lesson could easily be: I played the lotto and won big. Therefore, everyone should play the lotto.

Really? Going to extra mile to support your customers will give you a good reputation. It's nothing to do with playing the lottery. In this case it paid off in a big way. In the general case over the lifetime of your business it will almost certainly help you out somewhere.

I've just finished several freelance jobs where I've made sure to go above what was required. That's several people who will recommend me to others. That's not playing the lottery, it's just a sensible way of operating.

But the alternative possibility, when running a retail business, is that you blow 90% of your time being extra-nice to existing customers and never get around to building the features that would have attracted new users. It depends what stage of growth your business is at; the bigger you get, the unpleasant reality is that the less important any individual customer becomes.

There are definitely times when you need to make choices; you have a finite amount of time and energy and you can't put all of it into customer service. I too would suggest that spending all your time providing perfect customer service to a few customers is probably misplaced effort.

You can always make sure that all your interactions are as pleasant as possible. That will cost you very little time and will leave a lasting impression.

Today I had my first (and hopefully only) encounter with Dreamhost customer support. I was trialling a setup for a client who was looking to host 3 sites with them. By no means a big account, maybe not worth their time. Because of the way I was treated I will have nothing further to do with them as a company if I can possibly help it. I will never use them myself and I will never recommend that my clients do either. Had they taken the time to offer me courteous support I could have gone away happy and the entire process could have been completed faster. Sometimes you don't even need to be nice, you just need to show some manners.

I definitely fell into the latter category. Of the total time I spent doing customer service, there were about ten people I knew on a first-name basis. They had my personal e-mail address and I'd always respond to them within a half hour, often with a call back.

I never did have good tracking metrics in place for time spent per customer. I was a one-man shop and this was in 2000-2003, so there were limited open source options.

Customer support ate up a little more than half my time. This took away from programming and business development. Of the customer support time, maybe five or ten percent was spent on these ten customers -- and that is out of ten thousand paying customers and a few hundred thousand free users.

I never got a four million dollar phone call, but I also don't know how much these ten users evangelized my services. Who knows -- maybe they were responsible for a thousand paying customers?

There's an old phrase: "I know half of my ad dollars are wasted, but I don't know which half!" Nowadays it's a lot easier to measure return, but I still think we're not at the point where we can quantify good will from customer service.

For a given level of service, customer support costs a certain amount C * scaling costs S your predict return on investment is R / probability P.

If C * S > R / P, then don't play.

It wouldn't make sense, for instance, for a company like Google to treat all its customers the same way that enterprise SaaS companies treat their more precious customers. S is too big for them. That level of service is manpower intensive.

On the other hand it's probably something you can afford to at the beginning, when you have few customers - an advantage of being a startup, (as I recall being told a few years back, 'You are your own slave labour.')

I have found China to be paradoxically fantastic at customer service, especially for small clients. They're willing to put in the time and effort on relatively small companies because any income is good income, and building that relationship could mean good references later on with bigger contracts. I have only had two chinese factories turn me down for projects because I'm too small, and the ones that don't I will hopefully be able to award with increasingly large projects as I grow.

I wonder what their figures are in terms of customers / expenses, that would be very interesting to see.

>That's several people who will recommend me to others. //

"Use this guy, you don't have to pay him for all the work."

Being a champion of world class service is always the goal and stories like this never get old. Keep in mind that there are also hidden/intangible costs associated with delivery of this level of service, for every "Bob the 4 million dollar client", there are 10 "John the 2 hour time-syncs". I am not saying that you should not strive for world-class service, because you should. I would speak more to pricing your services accordingly and not under valuing them to the point where you cannot take care of clients properly.

Kind of an entertaining coincidence that the other post from inc.com on the front page right now is called 'Never be a customers doormat'.[http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/never-be-a-customers-doorm...]

As noted in the other HN thread, this is a great example of taking time out to help a customer that's having a tough time and reaping a reward.

But.

While it can be great to have a general philosophy of "always provide the best customer service possible, even at 2am, no matter the customer," a great CEO will need to act based on the realities of their business situation -- informed by these philosophies, but not locked down by them.

I agree that in the context of business you should always be as nice as possible, no matter how difficult of a time you're having with someone. But some customers aren't the right customers for your business, and they should be guided elsewhere.

This is what Dell Computer was like in the early days. I worked there in the late 80s. Tech support would try to solve any problem a customer had, regardless of whether it had anything to do with the PC hardware. I think that kind of service was a key to early success.

Early stage companies do well to take this approach, because they can use the input to inform future service/product enhancements knowing what works and what doesn't.

Specifically with Dell, one of their big angles, IIRC, was custom built stuff. While there wasn't an unlimited variation of possibilities, it was enough that my Dell wasn't necessarily the same as your Dell - whether it was their problem or not, many other vendors would punt on the support.

This deeply relates with the "Do things that don't scale" essay from PG.

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

As long as you can, do things that don't scale. Even if the end of this history were different, the writer would have lost near to nothing, and possibly gained some insight.

As someone who has been on night-shift on-call for end-user support while working the day job at the same time, let me assure you that you don't lose 'near to nothing'.

Most of the comments in this thread assume that the cost of support is trivial. It's not. Support is a product unto itself, and shouldn't be trivialised into "come on, it doesn't take much!".

I have come across this kind of support numerous times from various companies like Apple, NEC and Wacom. The result is, I firmly recommend them everytime I have a chance and will continue to do them as long as they provide transparency.

Old repost but a good one. Reminds us that every customer has a potential story which can be pivotal to your business.

Is Inc the new Medium?

These are all starting to look like SugarApe out of Nathan Barley.

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