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The $4 Million Complaint Call

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Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#61

Post by tedunangst »

excuse-me wrote: post #29
Mz wrote: post #14

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…

And a tip to all the Mercedes dealerships in an oil town like Aberdeen or Houston. If an older guy drives up in a beat-up oil company 4x4, don't tell him he can't take a car out on a test drive because it's raining!

In other parts of the country, it's an old farmer who just sold his land and wants to buy a new car for each of his four kids, but has to wait around at the dealership until finally the lowest ranking junior salesman is sent out to deal with him.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#63

Post by rprasad »

msluyter wrote: post #31

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.

Time spent on this sort of stuff early in the lifecyle of a product can be invaluable to fixing/iterating the product for countless future customers.

Think of it as beta testing or customer-focused design that you are getting paid to do.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#64

Post by pnathan »

epoxyhockey wrote: post #9
pnathan wrote: post #4

Some 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.

Yeah, some customers are really not going to be happy, ever. Ever. They will leech you for all you're worth.

But then there are Bobs.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#65

Post by gautamsomani »

wccrawford wrote: post #48

It all depends on the customer. Bob was apparently a nice guy who just needed a lot of help. I'd have helped him. Had Bob been a jerk and constantly harassed the support staff with problems that were of his own making, then I'd have gotten rid of him. Probably. There could be circumstances. Anecdote time: I worked at an SaaS company. 1 customer was constantly flooding our system via an automated system he had written…

This is interesting, I mean a user (aka customer) of a system pointing out the bottlenecks (or loopholes) of your system. I'll remember this incident of yours. :)

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#66

Post by patio11 »

I paid for college working as an Order Entry operator for a division large office supplies store (you know, the kind of place where you go when you want to buy paper and... staples). We got a memo from the CEO every couple of months. I can quote the most memorable one in it's entirety:

[Grainy photograph of photocopied email with effusive praise from the Purchasing Director at a Midwestern life insurance company, which had just opened a $300,000 a year account with us, about his purchasing experience with $COMPANY.]

Bob is talking about the $22.69 order he made of balloons for his daughter's birthday. Treat every order like Cindy treated that one. Keep up the good work. -- CEO

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#67

Post by Udo »

msluyter wrote: post #31

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.

I wish I could vote this up ten times! Another scenario is the company getting successfully sued by Bob for damages because his Windows crashed.

Most of the time, the "best" possible outcome with these customers is you'll be held responsible for all their IT problems as an unpaid technician, and the worst would be they'll use patience with their entire computing setup and take it all out on you. The odds of Bob-type users damaging or even destroying a small company are vastly greater than anything else that could happen.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#68

Post by sparknlaunch »

Nice story however you would only commit to this level of customer service if you had the time, patience and suitable customer base. I don't think many would be spending hours with a customer for a low value product or where little value can be derived.

This situation paid off, however you never know if the directors or companies may have discovered the business through other means.

I know this all sounds cynical but it's a careful balance of sensibility.

Re: The $4 Million Complaint Call

#70

Post by rohansingh »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20
rohansingh wrote: post #5

This 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…

Interesting take on it, which I disagree with. This isn't "gambling with your time" this is "making good on your customer's commitment". And your note triggered a really interesting visceral reaction in me. You can look at life as a series of choices you make and a scoring system by which you evaluate the quality of those choices. Typically a positive scoring system is used so the higher the score the 'better' the de…

Let me reply to just one part of this, which I think responds to the main point I was trying to make:

> Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win.

While this may be true, the fact remains that you have a limited amount of time. As a matter of reality, you simply cannot spend an infinite amount of time with every customer.

My original point was that, given that you have this limited amount of time, it is important to intelligently decide how to divide it among multiple customers and priorities — rather than simply spending inordinate amounts of time with single customers because they ask for it.

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