The $4 Million Complaint Call
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Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call
#2How many companies, even small ones, have that kind of support?
Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call
#3How many companies, even small ones, have that kind of support?
I've had a pretty good experience with Dropbox and Amazon. And more recently with Dell (surprise!)
Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call
#4Some people advocate firing your troublesome customers.
This is an example of why you just might not want to do that.
Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call
#5This is effectively gambling with your time. You only have a limited amount of time available each day. The minutes or hours you spend on the phone with a single customer, walking them through things like how to install Windows, are minutes or hours you are not using to build things that could reach all of your customers.
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.
Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call
#6even if it had not led to the $4M account (which was an unpredictable, lottery-ticket sort of occurrence), the author identified an excellent "selfish" reason to take the call and spend time with bob - they explicitly designed their software as easy to use, so the travails of an actual person in the industry, who was using their software for his day-to-day business and having problems with it, would have been incredibly valuable user feedback.
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.
Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call
#7Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call
#8Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call
#9Some people advocate firing your troublesome customers. This is an example of why you just might not want to do that.
There are 2 types of troublesome customers, ones that need extra help using your product and ones that want you to bleed (i.e. they want free stuff or competitors that want you to lose).
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.
Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call
#10This is effectively gambling with your time. You only have a limited amount of time available each day. The minutes or hours you spend on the phone with a single customer, walking them through things like how to install Windows, are minutes or hours you are not using to build things that could reach all of your customers. You could luck out, and that time you spent with a single customer could end up like this, with…
True, time is always limited, but there's also something to be said for doing things that can't possibly scale while your company is still small enough for it to be possible.