The $4 Million Complaint Call

If that's true, you know what it tells me? This was incredibly well designed software. The reason Ron got $4 million dollars wasn't because he spent time on the phone with Bob. It's because he had great software that worked and that a complete novice, with a little help, could configure and run. What large company wouldn't want software like that?

Yes, customer service is important, but having a great product that's easy to use is the really big lesson here.

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.

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.

I turned 47 yesterday. Some of my anecdotes are no doubt older than some of the members of this forum.

Peace.