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The most notorious monopolies of our time. The things which bring down our economy with their shenanigans every so often because they so thoroughly own the poli

by M_Grey 10y ago

The most notorious monopolies of our time. The things which bring down our economy with their shenanigans every so often because they so thoroughly own the political and legislative process. Huh? Grocery Stores? I don't see how that applies... they tend to be highly customer-focused, and they certainly don't do the equivalent of bricking a product after selling it to you because they didn't like your tone. Still I take your point... if you're a Unicorn then you play by different rules, until/unless it all catches up with you (as it is with Uber). If however, you're not a telecom monopoly, a giant bank, or just crazy like Uber (if for example you're trying to sell IoT fricking door openers) then you are in a very very different position don't you think?!

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Again, yes and no. I know a few local on-line retailers that handle their own faulty services like so: - bribe the customers leaving negative reviews into cancelling them, by offering e.g. free products - use multiple accounts on the marketplace services, kill off an account after it got too many negative reviews and create a new one to continue The point being, "customer is always right" is not something that works for all B2C; depending on your market type, there may be strategies that let you be pretty much immune from the effects of a wronged customer seeking revenge. For instance, commodity items are bought by people who are mostly price-sensitive; as long as you keep a lower price, even angry reviews won't mean much. This works well for brick-and-mortar grocery stores (and other inherently local stores) and for business that sell through on-line marketplaces like eBay. It's sometimes even beneficial to not have a strong social media presence - Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are a good place for angry customers to vent off and spread the bad word about you.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  ...Right, and the opposite of all of the positive ways to deal with it, would be bricking the device you sold to a customer, as in this case. We're not even talking about a bad review, just a forum post. While I grant your point about commodities, you can't be further from such a thing than an IoT garage door remote. Basically, this is a business in which you need to desperately convince the customer to want an ongoing relationship with you, for a service they could get with a $5 remote, 9volt included.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I'm in no way defending this particular company here; I was responding to the issue of "customer is always right" wrt. B2C business. The company here behaved wrong and they deserve whatever loss of business comes out of this mess, regardless of how rude the customer was. They handled it badly. That said, I have no particular love for IoT companies - I find the idea of those cloud-connected devices to be dumb from both user and engineering point of view. To be clear - I'm not opposed to smart devices per se - just those which require vendor's cloud, which makes them basically hardware-as-a-service, and which works against privacy and interoperability.

by M_Grey 10y ago

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Again, yes and no. I know a few local on-line retailers that handle their own faulty services like so: - bribe the customers leaving negative reviews into cancelling them, by offering e.g. free products - use multiple accounts on the marketplace services, kill off an account after it got too many negative reviews and create a new one to continue The point being, "customer is always right" is not something that works for all B2C; depending on your market type, there may be strategies that let you be pretty much immune from the effects of a wronged customer seeking revenge. For instance, commodity items are bought by people who are mostly price-sensitive; as long as you keep a lower price, even angry reviews won't mean much. This works well for brick-and-mortar grocery stores (and other inherently local stores) and for business that sell through on-line marketplaces like eBay. It's sometimes even beneficial to not have a strong social media presence - Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are a good place for angry customers to vent off and spread the bad word about you.

M_Grey 10y ago
...Right, and the opposite of all of the positive ways to deal with it, would be bricking the device you sold to a customer, as in this case. We're not even talking about a bad review, just a forum post. While I grant your point about commodities, you can't be further from such a thing than an IoT garage door remote. Basically, this is a business in which you need to desperately convince the customer to want an ongoing relationship with you, for a service they could get with a $5 remote, 9volt included.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I'm in no way defending this particular company here; I was responding to the issue of "customer is always right" wrt. B2C business. The company here behaved wrong and they deserve whatever loss of business comes out of this mess, regardless of how rude the customer was. They handled it badly. That said, I have no particular love for IoT companies - I find the idea of those cloud-connected devices to be dumb from both user and engineering point of view. To be clear - I'm not opposed to smart devices per se - just those which require vendor's cloud, which makes them basically hardware-as-a-service, and which works against privacy and interoperability.