A Message To our Customers from our CEO | Hacker News Reader

A Message To our Customers from our CEO

blog.postmates.com

22 pointsprotomyth23 comments

Have you been in a chain grocery store and seen a store executive in suit discussing shelf placement with a supplier? They'll always take time to say hello to customers and be super-helpful and friendly. That's how good customer service attitude is propagated down from the top. When the boss disrespects customers in front of his team, that sets the upper limit for how well customers will be treated by the company.

As a CEO, if a customer can't be satisfied with your current offerings, you should sympathize with their frustration and wish them the best. And thank them for caring enough to try your service at all.

> When the boss disrespects customers in front of his team, that sets the upper limit for how well customers will be treated by the company.

A single incident sets the upper limit? We don't know what kind of example he sets on a day-to-day basis. Customer service is a mentally taxing job. If I'm the person on the front line, I'm thinking, "at least the boss understands and has my back" rather than feeling defeated. Some customers are just bad customers; sure, try to understand and sympathize but there comes a point to tell them to "fuck off" (in the appropriate customer-service language).

The only thing wrong here is that it leaked out to the customer.

So, how does this square with the "fire your customers" dictum that seems to be pretty common in SV?

You fire them by telling them you unfortunately can't meet their needs at this time, not by telling them to F off.

You could always try both: "Unfortunately, we cannot meet your needs at this time, so F off."

Right. But "tell them to fuck off" is just an emotionally-charged, internal shorthand for "their demands are unreasonable, so using the normal niceties let them know we can't provide what's been requested".

Anyone so literal-minded to think such hyperbole is a actual request to tell a customer to "fuck off" is not qualified to be either a CEO or a Customer Support Representative.

True, but a CEO should know not to send anything in poor taste in email at all. Stuff like this can happen, and not always by accident.

CEOs are people with frustrations and lapses too.

And some high-functioning teams use extremely ribald language internally. Composing every internal message to a "what if this become public?" standard is the safest policy, but imposes such costs on clarity/motivation/speed that it might not be the optimal policy.

Using "ribald language internally" might be ok until you get into your first lawsuit with discovery. It does tend to rub a jury a bit wrong.

Without seeing both sides, all I can really say is that whoever forwarded this to the customer is the one who unambiguously messed up here. The CEO of a company is allowed to get frustrated, in general, and he clearly didn't intend this to reach the customer. Whether his frustration was justified is really another question which can't be answered without more information.

The person who forwarded it to the customer clearly messed up, but (to paraphrase Steve Jobs) somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons for screwups stop mattering. In general, you should always write email assuming that everyone will read it. Email has a way of being forwarded and re-forwarded. All of us forget this from time to time. As a CEO though, you can't really afford the luxury of forgetting. A CEO's emails are ripe for finding their way to other people in the company, journalists, investors, etc...

It reminds me a lot of learning why it's a good idea to not use profanity in code comments, even if you're pretty sure it'll never end up in production code.

The basic idea is, even if it'll never end up in production code, if you're in the habit of writing profanity in comments, odds are, over enough time, at some point that code will be seen by someone you'd rather not have to see it.

This feels like TMZ. Other than critiquing and learning from the things he says in response to it, I see very little value in this. I also don't like fun; so there's that! :)

original tweet https://twitter.com/Erin_Boudreau/status/379294594866741249

Looks more like a pitchfork mob, to me; the guy can't even apologize for a misstep. I bet none of these people have ever said anything bad about another, in a private place! It shouldn't really matter if they are customers or not.

So... are we going to hear the other side of this? I mean, sometimes the 'customer is not always right' and I think it's fair to assume he is mostly sorry only because he got caught. But I want to know what the issue was that prompted such a forceful reply.

Some customers are just ... not customers but pathological users. With "f--- off" he probably meant: issue the refund, delete account, and deeply apologize.

Or he meant, you know, "f--- off."

I assume the customer service rep that responded to this got fired? Yes, its unacceptable for the CEO to say something like this, but its a customer service reps JOB to ALWAYS respond calmly and friendly to customers.

If they really thought he wanted that message forwarded on to the customer, they need to find a new line of work

I might be in the minority but I'd rather hear "go fuck yourself" than insincere statements about how much they care while basically telling me to go fuck myself. It's right up there with the "it was my pleasure" reply from customer service. You derive pleasure from helping me? Well in that case come on over to my house and I'll give you an orgasm of work to do.

Two weeks ago my wife and I were at a comedy club. We paid an extra $7 for reserved seating - meaning nobody would be sitting at our table. Next to our table was another couple that paid for reserved seating. Note that when I say "reserved table" you should know that the tables are practically touching each other and the room is wall-to-wall people.

Somehow this other couple with a reserved table ends up with two dudes being sat at their table. They're actually closer to me than the other couple though. The woman from the couple got up three times to complain to the manager. She literally missed half the show. Finally the manager comes up to me, hands me two free tickets for a future show and asks if I would mind if the two dudes sat at our table. I said no problem. Ironically, the dudes were further away from us at our table and closer to the lady complaining about them sitting at our table.

Some people are just so unbelievably difficult to deal with and are unsatisfied with anything to the point they will cut off their nose to spite their face. I don't know anything about this situation but I've seen so many customers deserve to be told to fuck off that I'm not surprised if one got told that.

Wow! If I understand this correctly, he asked customer service to write this response?

Clearly it was sarcastic. Someone just, intentionally or otherwise, forwarded it to the customer too.

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