Go ahead, be rude. It will cost you $350k

Post by BizarroLand » Fri, Nov 11, 2022, 11:57 PM UTC

jasmer wrote: post #7

LinuxBender wrote: post #3

I have some anecdotal experience with this. I was at an Oracle event representing my company that managed Oracle for a very large number of customers. I met Larry. He treated me like I was an insignificant and why was I even talking to him . I considered that rude and highly dismissive. It became my goal to get our customers away from Oracle to which I had some success. Quite a few customers were able to move to MySQ…

Larry has all sorts of questionable qualities, and there are plenty of reasons to leave (or use) Oracle, but some person being arbitrarily dismissive isn't really one of them. Unless the dismissiveness was over something very material. "I would like to think it cost him at least a few of his racing yachts." - because the CEO/Director of a massive multinational conglomerate with 100 000 employees didn't arbitrarily ha…

Post by BizarroLand » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 12:00 AM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #10

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

The first time I read the phrase "the customer is always right" was a book about aluminum produced by the Alcoa company when I was a kid. When I parrot this phrase to most people today they tell me the opposite is true, that any customer who isn't satisfied is an asshole and is doing you a favor if they switch to the competition. I remember reading a business book in the early 2000s that said as much and that you sho…

It's just an SNR problem with the phrase. The LTV of the customer needs to exceed the CAC plus COGS for that customer. And if you can't see that being the case, firing the customer is necessary. In many businesses this is hard to account for, but we can do this now. Hence AWS charging a premium for proper support. The interesting part of "the customer is always right" is that it moves one from the "this customer is i…

Post by renewiltord » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 12:21 AM UTC

BizarroLand wrote: post #13

renewiltord wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just an SNR problem with the phrase. The LTV of the customer needs to exceed the CAC plus COGS for that customer. And if you can't see that being the case, firing the customer is necessary. In many businesses this is hard to account for, but we can do this now. Hence AWS charging a premium for proper support. The interesting part of "the customer is always right" is that it moves one from the "this customer is i…

"The customer is always right" is better read as, "Sell the customer what they want to buy (if you can)". That doesn't mean the customer gets to mistreat or assault your employees over the proximity of pickles to their hamburger patty when it was being cooked, but that if enough customers ask for more meat on their burger then you should offer a double or triple patty option.

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 12:50 AM UTC

Post by sdfhbdf » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 1:06 AM UTC

rkagerer wrote: post #16

renewiltord wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Then it's a tale of poor CRM, where you can't tie your support calls into the rest of customer flow. Could totally see that if look up support purely by SKU and serial without thing it into rest of CRM. Hmm. At a startup I worked, the only thing that kept "is this important" in mind was a rough list of importance in eng managers' heads. Definitely led to us misprioritizing customers.

Or you can strive to treat every customer like gold and reap the long term rewards of an impeccable reputation.