Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

softwarebyrob.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#41

Post by Firehed »

radley wrote: post #3

We got one yesterday. Had a list of changes he expected us to make for our app. Most were really redundant and outdated ideas. I wrote responses to each portion of his email: yes, no, maybe... I got to the last paragraph: if we made all of the changes he'd be happy to bump up his rating of our app to 3 or 4 stars. At that point I deleted everything I wrote and instead politely brushed him off and offered a refund.

This is why it's best to avoid line-by-line negotiations. Wait until everything is on the table, see what the offer is, and go from there. If you aren't interested in the end result, you can save yourself a lot of time. If you are, it allows you to figure out the things you care most and least about, and apply flexibility accordingly.

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#42

Post by fusiongyro »

_yosefk wrote: post #31
fusiongyro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

37signals had an article a few months ago that essentially argued you should never do that. The argument went that if your biggest customer is only worth $200/month, it prevents you from getting confused about who you work for. If Coke paid 37signals $2,000,000 a month for Basecamp, it would turn into Cokecamp. When Coke takes their business elsewhere they'd be stuck with a weird product highly customized to Coke whi…

BitKeeper user here; AFAIK BitMover got $0 for hosting Linux though they did get a lot of fame. And their biggest problem apparently isn't that BitKeeper "turned into a LinuxKeeper", but rather free BitKeeper clones like git and hg (the first of which was originally created for Linux). So, just curious about your interpretation of your Cokecamp analogy; to me their problems (to the extent that they experience problem…

My impression is that BitKeeper was designed with an eye towards Linus's own habits, and my point was that BitKeeper suffered as a result. As best I can reconstruct I seem to have gotten this impression from this article:

http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/thoughts/bitkeeper.whynot

"From the beginning, Bitkeeper has been aimed at making it easier to do development the way Linux kernel development is done. As Larry McVoy put it: 'BK makes it really easy to do what Linus is doing.'"

If you follow the links in that article, Larry McVoy doesn't really say what he's quoted as saying there, though he does make similar assertions.

BitKeeper certainly made no money on supporting Linux but I think the idea, on some level, must have been to get the software out there being used by serious programmers who would then love it, buy it, and evangelize it. In the driest sense, it was not a success. But in a wider sense in backfired so thoroughly that the idea of starting a commercial VCS project at this point is laughably absurd. Several things McVoy said turned out to be wrong, even though they must have sounded plausible at the time. I'm particularly pointing to this one:

"All you people trying to copy BK are just shooting yourself in the foot unless you can come up with a solution that Linus will use in the short term. And nobody but an idiot believes that is possible."

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0303.1/0315.h...

So, it probably isn't the best analogy, but on the other hand it was the first one that came to mind. :) I'd be curious to know what you think about this, and more importantly what your opinion of BK is today and how it compares after having a decade to mature.

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#43

Post by sarah2079 »

One thing that has really surprised me is how little you can tell about a customer based on their initial email. When I get an angry or rude email, about 95% of the time they will turn into a polite human being once I respond calmly with help for their problem. A lot of people just do not expect to be able make contact with an actual human or to get any useful help, and are angry from the get go because of this. The article mentions "disrespectful & abrupt" emails. For me this extends this to include "angry and hateful." It is truly amazing the 180 people can do once they are talking to a person instead of an anonymous customer support address.

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#44

Post by danielrhodes »

otakucode wrote: post #10

Never say no. EVER. I mean it. Not one single time, not under any circumstances ever. Make them say no. The way you do this is by determining just how much you would have to be paid in order to deal with the customer. It doesn't matter if it's a completely unreasonable number. Name it. Don't just presume they will refuse and turn them away. Tell them that your product which would normally cost $1k is going to cost th…

I think this comes down to where you think the greatest return will be. Ultimately it comes down to time. If you can make more over the long-term serving a few high-paying customers, do this. If you can make more serving many smaller customers, do that. Unless you have a sizable organization, it is hard to do both and keep everybody satisfied and your company focused.

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#45

Post by wtracy »

danielweber wrote: post #4

It looks like internal politics at the prospect were at play here. The guy didn't want to be doing this and decided to take his bad attitude out on the vendor he was assigned to deal with.

Now that you say that, that brings up the possibility that the guy was actually hoping to sabotage the purchase.

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#46

Post by sarah2079 »

radley wrote: post #3

We got one yesterday. Had a list of changes he expected us to make for our app. Most were really redundant and outdated ideas. I wrote responses to each portion of his email: yes, no, maybe... I got to the last paragraph: if we made all of the changes he'd be happy to bump up his rating of our app to 3 or 4 stars. At that point I deleted everything I wrote and instead politely brushed him off and offered a refund.

I get this all the time. My strategy is to respond honestly about whether any of the changes they are suggesting are coming and why I have decided not to add them if they are not, and when it comes to the rating bribery just ignore the fact that they mentioned it. Also popular: "I will buy your in app purchase if you add/change X" (So tempting! A whole 99 cents you say?).

Interestingly with this treatment I have not noticed these customers being any more trouble than usual as a group. They usually seem very happy to get an honest response from a real person. Even though behavior like this irks me, I think it is mainly a symptom of the fact that you often have to try so hard to be heard by customer support these days.

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#47

Post by garrettdimon »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #7

I don't see why asking for a discount is so toxic. We ask for a discount on every transaction with a 3rd party our business makes and more often than not we get one. It seems like most business to business transactions start with the "dummy price" out the gate.

It's unfortunate that businesses do this. Starting off a relationship with a new customer by effectively saying that your pricing isn't 100% honest seems like the wrong way to go about it.

I want every one of our customers to be 100% confident that they are paying the same price as anybody else on the same plan. In our case, I've even explicitly refused to do any deals or promotional discounts. This keeps things simple for us to keep track of as well.

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#48

Post by measure2xcut1x »

BryanB55 wrote: post #14
otakucode wrote: post #10

Never say no. EVER. I mean it. Not one single time, not under any circumstances ever. Make them say no. The way you do this is by determining just how much you would have to be paid in order to deal with the customer. It doesn't matter if it's a completely unreasonable number. Name it. Don't just presume they will refuse and turn them away. Tell them that your product which would normally cost $1k is going to cost th…

It's funny we've thought about doing this in a startup I run in the real estate industry where most of our customers are realtors. Unfortunately it's not always easy to arbitrarily raise your prices for the difficult customers because they complain even more and ask "where does it say that there will be a charge or fee for this on your website?" I always thought it would be nice to have an extra line on my pricing pa…

I also run a business with realtors as customers and I know exactly what you are talking about, some are definitely toxic. That said, I'm sure it's not just a realtor thing but it can seem that way.

We try to detect/filter them in the sales process. Unfortunately saying "I don't thing our product is a good fit for you" invariably seems to make them want it even more.

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#49

Post by rst »

_yosefk wrote: post #31
fusiongyro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

37signals had an article a few months ago that essentially argued you should never do that. The argument went that if your biggest customer is only worth $200/month, it prevents you from getting confused about who you work for. If Coke paid 37signals $2,000,000 a month for Basecamp, it would turn into Cokecamp. When Coke takes their business elsewhere they'd be stuck with a weird product highly customized to Coke whi…

BitKeeper user here; AFAIK BitMover got $0 for hosting Linux though they did get a lot of fame. And their biggest problem apparently isn't that BitKeeper "turned into a LinuxKeeper", but rather free BitKeeper clones like git and hg (the first of which was originally created for Linux). So, just curious about your interpretation of your Cokecamp analogy; to me their problems (to the extent that they experience problem…

That's true, but it's something of a self-inflicted wound.

The release of git and hg was a direct response to McVoy yanking BitKeeper away (withdrawing the free-beer licensing terms that had previously allowed gratis use for free/open source projects); both were initially announced on the Linux-kernel mailing list as responses to McVoy's move, and each had had only a few weeks' worth of work at that point.

Before that, there had been a good deal of grumbling about the ever-shifting terms of the "don't piss off Larry license", whose increasingly draconian terms were designed to prevent the development of competitive software. (The last available version purported to bind all users to a non-compete preventing them from contributing to another SCM; I'm not sure California law would have allowed McVoy to enforce a non-compete on his own employees!) However, so long as these difficulties remained theoretical, there was not, in fact, much serious work going on to develop such competition. But when Larry revoked the license, effectively forcing the kernel developers to come up with an alternative damn quick, they did --- and damn quick.

So, the clones aren't something that the customers did when they got dissatisfied with BitMover; they're something that happened after BitMover chose, on their own, to end the relationship. Which makes them, as I said, a self-inflicted wound, that BitMover could have avoided through better customer relations management.

Re: How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)

#50

Post by scott_s »

swombat wrote: post #2

I presume this came up because it was auto-tweeted from swombat.com (this got retweeted today: http://swombat.com/2010/12/9/how-to-detect-a-toxic-customer ). If so, it's worth pointing to Joel Spolsky's response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 Definitely worth a read alongside this article.

And please also read the counter-counter-points in that thread, in particular, one by the original author: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1988330

And http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990229

Post reply on HN