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Meanwhile, at the other companies where CEO was too sleepy to make good decisions because he was up all night helping customers configure Windows... well, we don't hear those stories, because they folded.
Edited to add: not to denigrate what he did here. He did a nice thing, and it's laudable to be a good person who helps people, whether or not it's the optimal way to spend your time.
I love stories like this. A couple of others that come to mind with a similar theme: A bank was going to turn down an account for some long-haired young man in jeans who wanted his statements forwarded all over the place. Then some young employee told the middle-aged manager he was a wealthy rock star who needed his bank statements available while touring. Some young bank teller with an attitude was being an ass to a…
Bah, that's a wimpy version. The story I heard was he bought the branch and fired her.
While some people are sharp enough to see around the corners and figure out the end game not everybody is.
While I thoroughly enjoy the heartwarming part, I don't think that's why it's good advice from a business perspective. It's great advice because word of mouth is extremely important for a technical business selling to a small but lucrative market where buyers have alternatives (like hiring decisions). This will have less impact in large consumer sales where advertising matters, or when you have a market cornered. It…
The comment below at this time ('survivorship bias') is also correct, but only if it's interpreted as a touching anecdote rather than as crucial customer-behavior information for his market segment. Understanding the dynamics of how your customers make their purchasing decisions seems like a better lesson to take from this.
(Not the same for every product, either! E.g., my being passionate about Cheerios does nothing for General Mills, really...)
Survivorship bias. Meanwhile, at the other companies where CEO was too sleepy to make good decisions because he was up all night helping customers configure Windows... well, we don't hear those stories, because they folded. Edited to add: not to denigrate what he did here. He did a nice thing, and it's laudable to be a good person who helps people, whether or not it's the optimal way to spend your time.
How many companies, even small ones, have that kind of support?
Small companies can afford to do this much better than big ones, since they're often doing it in house. "White Glove" customer support is one of the few things you can do to beat the big guys when you're first starting out. Joel said it best: Remarkable Customer Service, as in service so good that people actually remark about it. http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
There's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. I'm a huge advocate of going the extra mile to help out a customer, but I could easily imagine a story where a company wasn't able to focus on its profitable customers because it was so inundated with supporting unqualified users that it didn't have the time and resources to close a $10M sale. "We would have chosen to go with ACME Technologies, but when we had challen…
I used to work for a company that worked in sleep medicine, so we had the wonders of a busy night call schedule. Our CEO boasted of our support record (wilfully ignoring actual data) and would demand to know why we didn't do a 2am drive to a customer having difficulties like he did back when he was operating the business out of his garage. It didn't slow him down much when we pointed out that the lab having problems was literally on the other side of the continent.
Support is a bit like healthcare - there is always more demand than there is supply. The trick is how to triage it appropriately.
I used to enjoy this type of article, now the thought process is about the likelihood of it happening to your company.
How many companies, even small ones, have that kind of support?