18 ms·

Fire your bad customers

393 points by grwthckrmstr 6y ago

kenhwang 6y ago
Alternatively, charge them appropriately. I billed at double rate with an one hour minimum for unscheduled phone inquiries. Nothing makes you rich or stops their misbehavior faster than sending a $200 bill for a 2-minute call that was essentially "did you see my email?" Special feature requests were tied to minimum spend contracts.
- arp242 6y ago
  Did you have a prior agreement for that? I'm not sure if it's either legal or ethical to do that without prior agreement, no matter how difficult they are.
  - kenhwang 6y ago
    Yep, if there's no service/support contract I'm not doing customer service/support. Then it's simply minimum time billed and normal/after hours/emergency billing rates and definitions for what is considered an emergency (how much prior notice, how much time to respond). Very typical SLA stuff.
    - arp242 6y ago
      How will people know if they're going to be charged double though?
      - paulcole 6y ago
        It’s defined in the contract.
      - kenhwang 6y ago
        It's a courtesy to let them know the first time. Otherwise each call would be a line item on the month-end invoice with the call subject, the time/length of the call, and amount billed.
  - sbierwagen 6y ago
    Without a contract, an invoice is just a piece of paper. The worst thing they can do is not pay it.
    - aronpye 6y ago
      An invoice is a contract, you have to pay them
      - paulcole 6y ago
        As long as terms are set in advance. If they’re not and I call you on the phone for 1 minute and you send me a $200 invoice, I’m not paying it. Sue me and see if the invoice is a contract.
      - tomalpha 6y ago
        I don’t think that’s true. An invoice is just a formal request for payment. It doesn’t itself legitimise that request. Otherwise I could send you an invoice for $1m out of the blue and according to that logic you’d have to pay me. There must have been some agreement, most likely in the form of a contract, in advance, for you to have to pay that invoice. And even then, some companies employ large teams of people whose entire job is trying to avoid or delaying paying invoices in order to improve their cash flow.
      - jlokier 6y ago
        It actually isn't. An agreement with consideration is a contract. (Consideration means something of value is exchanged.) However the agreement is made. It could be on the phone, text, smoke signals, anything. Though if it's denied later you may have a hard time proving the contract was made. Usually an invoice is sent after an agreement. You have to pay those because you already made a contract to pay (written or not, formal or informal), and quite often an invoice provides formality that was lacking before, crystallising the expected amount. The act of paying it generally signifies final agreement to that amount. For business contracts, often an invoice is the first time the buyer sees the exact amount the seller is expecting, because of details that weren't hashed out in advance (no need). For example per-hour freelancing can be like that; the buyer learns the number of hours the seller claims to have worked from the invoice. But people dispute invoices all the time if they aren't expected or differ significantly from the amount expected.
- Bootwizard 6y ago
  Careful not to go too overboard for this. I won't say the company's name for fear that I may work there one day. At my last job, a large enterprise database provider wouldn't provide any support to us unless we agreed to pay them upwards of $60k a year for a product we weren't going to use. And we weren't exactly a small customer for them either, we just weren't as big as some of their others. Don't become the toxic one yourself!
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    At this point, if you are going to hire Oracle, the proverb of the Frog and the Scorpion applies.
    - Bootwizard 6y ago
      Surprise! It wasn't Oracle :)
      - winrid 6y ago
        MongoDB?
        RandomBacon 6y ago
        Throwing out names doesn't help. Bootwizard shouldn't have even said it wasn't Oracle.
        true_religion 6y ago
        Technically true, but if they didn’t say it want Oracle then everyone would assume it was. I have never worked with a company that bought Oracle products, but I still have a bad experience from their presale calls.
      - mcv 6y ago
        I've got to admit, that was indeed a surprise. I really hope other DB vendors don't follow Oracle's example into toxic vendorship.
- grwthckrmstr 6y ago
  I was afraid to try this, because as someone else pointed out, what if they agree and now I'm stuck with a high-paying toxic customer. Yikes!
  - eitland 6y ago
    @200 an hour, billed by the hour and counting from the first minute they have to be particularly toxic. Still I guess you should have your terms and conditions carefully though out.
    - thomasfedb 6y ago
      Irritation factor is an important billing metric. I very rarely say no to a job, I just price so that I'll be happy if they accept.
    - ecpottinger 6y ago
      When I did service call, we had a minimal charge for travel time (1 hour) with 1 hour increments. That way when they call for an service call where they were you knew it usually was important. Of-course, I did have one call that took me only 5 minutes to drive to the site and the three minutes to change the toner in the printer. The executive secretary who would not talk to me over the phone because she was so important suddenly found she would have to explain a two hour service call (1 hour travel, 1 minimum service time) to her boss. :)
  - kenhwang 6y ago
    If you're truly stuck, then make it a certainty. That's where those $60k/yr upfront+overages support contracts come in handy and how a customer singlehanded funded your helpdesk team. Very few rich customers aren't a handful. Let them make you rich first, then if you're lucky, you'd be surprised how quickly you outgrow them and have all sorts of tools at your disposal to deal with them.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    You’re not stuck with them longer than the terms of the contract. Leave an out and use it if the $200 1-minute phone calls aren’t worth it.
- ganafagol 6y ago
  And nothing pushes your app into oblivion faster than the bad reviews that you'll get in response. Be polite instead.
- hnarn 6y ago
  > Alternatively, charge them appropriately. A somewhat smarter pricing model, in my own opinion, is rather than charging someone $200 for a phone call, sell them "coupons" in advance where one coupon equals one support contact. When they have used up N percent of their available coupons, send them an automated e-mail and tell them that future contacts will be denied unless coupons are available. This way, you get the money up front, which is good. Customers that don't contact you a lot are also happy, because they won't need to "re-fill" for a long time -- and annoying customers that call you just to check if you got an e-mail will burn through their coupons in no time. This way, there is no explicit cost for a single phone call that can be challenged by the customer, it's simply an objective way of charging "support contacts", and it's up to the customer to minimize those contacts if they want to save money. What constitutes a contact is up to you, but in my mind it would make sense to classify "ticket creation" (not replies) or "phone call" both as separate contacts. This also makes tickets "worth" way more than a phone call, so you incentivize people to stop calling unless absolutely necessary.
drchiu 6y ago
I’ve used this trick in the past. More than a few times the bad customer tries to quickly do a 180 and be superficially apologetic to prolong the relationship. Unfortunately, behaving in this way, at least in their minds, represents an effective strategy for getting what they want. I’d be curious to hear what others have done in these cases? Raise prices even more? Refer to competitors?
- grwthckrmstr 6y ago
  Haha! I've had this exact same experience where one such bad customer became apologetic (especially when the found that alternative apps were bad) and stopped complaining.
- filmgirlcw 6y ago
  Raising prices on the customer can sometimes be a passive aggressive way out — you’re trying to force them to leave, but the downside is some people will pay and continue to be toxic and now you’re stuck with a high paying toxic customer; that’s the nightmare, a customer who sucks but brings in too much money to shitcan. I’d be in favor of a referral. I’m a direct person, so I might say something to someone like, “I recognize that you might think that you need to do [x-behavior] in order to get attention and support; you have probably had to do that in the past to get service. I need you to understand that this won’t be successful in our working relationship and that my business will not be beholden to [x,y,z]. If we are to continue working together, we need to have very clear communication about what services are in and out of scope that we can both agree to. If we can do that, I’m happy to keep working with you and will do my best to support your needs. If we can’t, I’m happy to refer you to some places that might be a better fit.”
  - grwthckrmstr 6y ago
    "but the downside is some people will pay and continue to be toxic and now you’re stuck with a high paying toxic customer" I totally hear you and this fear stopped us from charging extra from a toxic customer. "What if they said yes?"
    - 6y ago
MattGaiser 6y ago
A startup I know was basically killed by this (COVID was the main cause, but this was a large straw that absorbed a ton of time just before the pandemic). Over a month was spent caving to every inane request of this one customer and the only reason they did it was because the customer was willing to pay $250 and they were the first non-institutional paying customer so they were obsessed with getting it right. 5 figure a month contracts that were soon to start but paused due to the pandemic went unserviced so that large parts of the product could be rewritten to serve this one person as though they were the expert on what non institutional customers wanted. And in the end they wanted nothing more than a custom Craigslist type of ad, just with their own custom style and everything. Could have spent that month protecting the large contracts.
- grwthckrmstr 6y ago
  Ouch! That must have hurt. I totally get that when someone has 0 or only a handful of customers, trying to service one that's showing interest (but being demanding) feels like the natural thing to do. But more often than not, the end outcome isn't favourable. A friend of mine serviced an early user of his app during the early days with free customisations. That same user came back asking for more custom features, while being on the FREE plan, and threatened to write a 1 star review if they didn't. Toxic.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    How did that all end with your friend? Was he able to fire him?
    - grwthckrmstr 6y ago
      Actually, I had this conversation 2 days ago and haven't heard back since. That combined with my own experiences prompted me to write the blog post. I'm going to follow up and report back. Update: His reply - "Fired politely!"
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
timavr 6y ago
Bad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA. Also early there is not enough data to know who are the bad customers or who customers who are having real problems, they all look the same. The best way to deal with them is just to be honest: "This is not on our roadmap, yes we know issues exists. Here is link to issues forum" Public issues forum helps a lot, because if issue doesn't have upvotes or comments, they can reason that chances for developers getting to it is nearly zero. Especially for anything below non pure enterprise 100k+ per customer, there is no way team can address even 2% of issues if there is even hint of PMF. Even for massive companies like Atlassian and Unity there are public feature requests that have thousands of upvotes and they just don't do them because it is not on the roadmap.
- plasma 6y ago
  nitpick: If I’ve reached out to support with a problem or idea, don’t tell me to repost it to an idea forum you have, do that for me, I’ve already told you about it. I’ve often given up at that point when I’m asked to do this. edit: agree with the rest of your post :)
  - anonytrary 6y ago
    I don't like this either and frankly, it's embarrassing when billion-dollar companies have poor support UX. Like why is the burden on the customer to re-submit their report? This is obviously an internal communications problem that should 100% be solved by the company, and they're just displaying how badly they haven't solved the problem yet. edit: I like the rest of OP's
    - Kiro 6y ago
      There's no obligation to listen to user feedback. I get over a hundred feature requests from users a month but I don't even respond to most of them.
      - anonytrary 6y ago
        I don't think anyone was saying that, but yes and no. There is a difference between people telling you there's a fire in your house vs. people telling you what furniture you should get. Bug reports and feature requests should be treated as different beasts in customer support flows. In any case, it depends on what service you're providing or what product you're selling, whether or not the reports are high-value and would impact the success of your business, what the they're about, etc. The onus is on the company to determine these things for themselves. The only reason I can think of for redirecting a user is if you're using it as some sort of quality control barrier to weed out the low quality and non-essential reports.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
One of the important lessons I learned when I was building websites/doing digital strategy consulting (and this was over a decade ago) was to charge more. I was hesitant to do this because starting out, you want to attract customers and you think being competitive and having low prices is the answer. That can work to an extent, but what I found was that all of my clients who I was charging low rates were demanding, needy, and wanted far more than they were paying for. They were terrible. When I raised my rates, the clients I got were much better. No more insane calls at all hours. No more requests for stuff never in the initial SOW. No more threats of finding someone else even cheaper to do it. It’s often hard to know who is a bad customer at the beginning, but once you figure it out, unless the customer is legitimately responsible for a massive part of your business, I agree, fire them. And if the bad customer is responsible for so much of your business you can’t fire them, start looking for a replacement set of customers so that you can work to do that.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  The bottom end of any market is a cesspit, both for buyers and sellers. I suspect it's the same at the top as well although I have little experience there. I've done quite a few projects for distribution companies, these are intermediaries selling stuff on very low margins, basically warehouses with a call centre. To survive they have to become obsessive over costs. They can't turn that cost cutting mentality off even when they are buying services rather than 10 million transistors or whatever they need. This makes them thoroughly miserable places to work. Amazon is an example but on a massive scale.
  - francescopnpn 6y ago
    I agree. But amazon has AWS too which is high-end. I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream. One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions)
    - 6y ago
shrimpx 6y ago
This article implies that you should fire customers who are bad as in demanding, annoying, toxic, high maintenance. But I don’t think it’s so straightforward. If the customer is faang and they pay a multimillion recurring contract, this guy will most likely swallow his discomforts and keep serving. That customer is not so “bad.” So the title should really be “get rid of customers who are bad for the business,” which is self evident.
- kqr 6y ago
  I think the point is more that it's easy to overestimate the value customers provide to the business. A customer that is paying an average amount but require 5x as much time as an average customer might not be considered "bad for the business" as long as they financially work out. What's usually missing from that line of reasoning is the opportunity cost of supporting that one customer instead of five others that are more average in demand.
- filmgirlcw 6y ago
  Well, I think this is written from the perspective of people who don’t have FAANG clients. I totally agree that when you do, the situation changes completely. There is an argument to be made that for a smaller/normal customer, the power balance between corporation and customer is about equal. Both have the right to fire each other and if the customer is toxic or takes more time to support than could be focused on something else, you should fire them. But the power dynamic changes once you start talking about big money. If you have a client that is responsible for 3/4 of your revenue, toxicity or not, firing them is easier said than done. And the bigger clients (FAANG types) know this too. There, I think the trick is to try to make the statement of work as clear as possible. The one thing about a FAANG client to remember is that not all accounts are created equal. If it’s not a six figure contract, just because you have a deal with someone from Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net doesn’t mean they can’t be fired. (It also doesn’t mean they have huge money or that your sales team can extort them. I had a podcast hosting provider try to upsell my zero-budget initiative into an enterprise plan my insanely low-volume podcast didn’t need by half-threatening to cut us off, just because I worked at a large media company. Needless to say, I fired them.)
- 6y ago
Proven 6y ago
Nice to see this upvoted considering all the whining here on HN about evictions. Something could be said about double standards but I'll leave that to others.
reillyse 6y ago
Maybe I’m just showing my age but this is a rehash of a very old idea. I’m pretty sure it’s in the 4 hour work week, which while largely a fantasy still had some decent ideas.
njsubedi 6y ago
From the perspective of a mobile app/game developer, I’d say developers who sell apps on the app stores aren’t so lucky. You need to respond, and resolve issues of each and every customer, otherwise get bombarded with a bunch of negative reviews from accounts of everyone they know. Just like the recent fate of TikTok app, but in a smaller scale. One time a single customer nearly took our business down by writing 1 star reviews every day for weeks about how we fucked him over with a paid app (that was $4.99) and that we were scamming because we didn’t fully refund him for the service he used for a month. The review highlights would only show his reviews so download and sale dropped, competitor ranked #1 from #2 .. and it was one hell of an experience. One day that guy stopped rating our app, and things started getting better. Yeah, it’s a bad idea to put the fate of your business in a single app, but we were just starting out. This happened because we kinda fired our one customer. From that day, everyone who asks for a refund even after using up the services gets a refund. Feature requests go to a voting arena; so far so good. We’re not sinking now.
- grwthckrmstr 6y ago
  That sounds horrible, and I can relate. Shopify store owners who are bad customers can also hold you hostage by posting a 1 star review (unless you meet their demands). Like you highlighted, it's even worse on mobile app stores as it's easy for them to get their friends to leave bad ratings. Great that you survived and grew out stronger from the experience :)
- m463 6y ago
  I remember reading the four hour work week years ago, and he said something like refund no questions asked. Look, amazon offers refunds when people send back a brick instead of a computer and jeff bezos is rich enough to compete in the space race 2.0
  - mcny 6y ago
    > Look, amazon offers refunds when people send back a brick instead of a computer and jeff bezos is rich enough to compete in the space race 2.0 I don’t do this. Not because I am a good person with morals but because I’m scared of being banned from Amazon.com Amazon.com can easily track what items I looked at and what items I place on my cart. What’s to stop them from tracking what items I return?
gitgud 6y ago
A "bad customer" is generally just a client who annoys you... in many cases it's a misunderstanding of how easy things are, or how much effort you're going to for them. Simply conveying the effort and time you're expending for them (very politely), helps them appreciate your business and temper their expectations...
- hhas01 6y ago
  “A "bad customer" is generally just a client who annoys you” Nonsense. A bad customer is one that costs your company more to service than it earns back in revenue. It’s simple arithmetic. Maybe they don’t bother to pay their bills. Maybe they run you ragged with endless change requests. Maybe they repeatedly start new projects then, just as you’ve done all the prep work, put them “on hold”. Maybe they string you along with promises of “big projects” coming down the pipeline that never actually arrive. Whatever it is, every hour you sink on them is an hour not spent on a customer that is profitable. The article may be thin, but it’s absolutely right: get rid of those assholes ASAP, and then fix your own damn processes so you don’t get screwed again. Otherwise they’ll drag you down and drain your business for you.
  - hhas01 6y ago
    I find it slightly amusing that somebody downvoted this, considering I speak from hard-learned experience here.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  You've had better experiences than I, then. Most of my clients have been quite enjoyable to work with, and that's great. But the difficult customers that expect everything immediately... They are very resistant to caring about how much effort it takes on your part, or engaging in actual two-way conversation. They appear to be only focused on themselves, to a self-defeating degree.
monadic2 6y ago
Man if only you could become a capitalist through some other means than being a capitalist to begin with.
- grwthckrmstr 6y ago
  Don't hate the player hate the game :D
nabla9 6y ago
These articles are like women's magazine articles for entrepreneurs. No substance. Just a simple story and obvious suggestion from some influencer. No real substance. How is this top in HN?
- matsemann 6y ago
  Because the discussion is worth having?
  - nabla9 6y ago
    I must admit that 'business as a lifestyle' is somewhat alien concept to me, so the relatively unsubstantial business bantering for entertainment seems strange.
    - unishark 6y ago
      I think you missed the point. The discussion is about how to handle problematic customers, which is worth having even if the linked article had little to contribute to it. It's not a lifestyle; it's people seeking and giving advice. Such advice can be a very helpful thing with direct financial implications.
- neilv 6y ago
  I think I know what you mean, that, historically, there's been a stereotype of "women's magazines", and you were using it as a familiar illustration. I propose that we figure out different illustrations. We can see similar, if less-recognized, patterns in many publications labeled as for "men", "lifetyle", "health", "technology", "news", etc. We've been calling them "women's magazines" so long, and I assume that, before I was born, society let magazine publishers frame how we call and think of the magazine, and its implied assertions about women. Today, with publishing opened up more, and even literal children posturing as broadcast "influencers", that some of the dynamics of publisher as often posturer, manipulator, and exploiter are more transparent to us. I don't know how to solve this, and it seems to be many different problems. But I'm thinking that one thing we can do about it (and certainly this is far from a novel idea, including in this particular space), is to reject manipulative terms and labels that self-interested parties try to force on us.
walrus01 6y ago
ISP perspective: Always have an ironclad definition in your service contracts and terms of service where the demarcation point is between your CPE at a customer's premises, and their LAN. Problems on one side of that demarc are your problem. Problems on the other side are not.
garyclarke27 6y ago
When I had an ERP & CRM Reseller business, most customers were reasonable but a significant few were bullies. I found the best way to deal with them is to be tough back, to say no to unreasonable requests, to charge even more than to other customers and remind them that they are always free to go elsewhere, I had several screaming swearing calls as a result, but the strange thing is, they rarely left and they paid in full.
patman81 6y ago
Once you decide to "fire a customer", it may not be easy to get thru that process. It can be tricky if the cancellation started on the side of the software provider. We run an enterprise saas business and at one point decided we can't work with a particular customer anymore. We informed the customer that we will terminate his service and cancel all his outstanding (unpaid) invoices. Soon after that, the customer started to take legal action against our company. It was quite an ordeal for about 12 months. At least it helped us improve our contracts and legal processes going forward. However, since than we are careful to vet new potential customers before we offer our software. If we feel the software isn't a good fit, we will tell the customer and work thru our concerns before signing a contract. Even if we may lose some potential customers in the process, it builds a more healthy and sustainable business. "Avoid toxic customers." Is now part of our handbook.
- csydas 6y ago
  This works if your business model allows you to be selective, but for many companies (big and small) you don't get to choose your customers. Even worse, a lot of times it's not fully bad customers, it's a bad customer attached to an otherwise benign entity that refuses to acknowledge the behavior of the bad customer. This is exacerbated for big businesses because typically the sales team and the product team are not working directly together except for POCs, and the discussions that a Sales team has and a Product Team has are very different. It's not even about technical competency most of the time from the Sales Team (my experience is they usually know just about what they should for the role, and smart Sales folk know when to stop and ask instead of making promises they can't keep), but rather that typically who the Sales team talks with is not the bad customer, but higher decision makers who just get a generalized feedback from the actual bad customer within their company. The nit-picky and vicious activities are abstracted out into some more generalized and calmer statements when delivered to decision-makers/Sales, and it can be very difficult to get any traction on such bad customers. I deal with these situations exclusively and it's time consuming and exhausting. Cheap legal threats aren't even the worst part (fun trick when you get a compensation request, just ask for detailed documentation on how they arrived at such a number; most times this is enough to shut down such requests as the number is just something they've pulled out of the air because "it sounded good" during a meeting), but instead that most of the time what you're dealing with "family problems" from these customers, and these are problems they just don't want to deal with personally. Business is weird.
P4wl0w 6y ago
This is some serious and good advice for doing business and also managing personal relationships. Do not fear to say 'No!' and do not try to be everyone's darling. I had to learn this the hard way because of exactly the same eagerness to do business and take up on all opportunities. My advice is to regularly reflect on your (business) relationships and evaluate them (good, ok, bad) and sort out everyone who just gives you more pain than value. Of course 'value' in business is not only profit but also a good relationship to your customer and wanting to do the job rather than wanting to do another one. In personal life 'value' can be that someone accepts you as you are and/or tells you their honest opinion even if you do not like what you hear. You will have to define your own meaning of 'value' to evaluate these relationships.
speleding 6y ago
Telling a bad customer they are sucking up too much support time may make them even angrier. In our support system we have a little flag for such customers (we use it rarely): instead of telling them outright they are too needy we wait a day before replying to them.
- epx 6y ago
  Exponential back off, use this technique all the time
neilv 6y ago
In the past, being an independent consultant for around a decade, I let 2-3 clients go. One of those, letting the client go turned out to be a huge mistake, since the reasons turned out to be a temporary blip. In so many words, the great executive later returned, some things that were concerning/unacceptable while the exec was away were presumably reversed, but I'd already moved on. Another, they just had an unsalvagable massive mess of a code base that an undergrad made, and they didn't appreciate how bad it was, and that it needed more than incremental work. Before and after the regretted cut-loose client, I also didn't take on at least a few clients who I had misgivings about. Some of those were probably due to once-bitten, twice-shy. Some problems I've learned to avoid, and I'll phrase them here as positives (I've found both the negative and positive examples): * Clients who realize they need more than a low-end programmer. Like many people, I have a lot of experience working higher-end than that, * Client respects you as an expert or competent professional. That doesn't mean they defer to you automatically. What you want to avoid are situations like someone key at the client thinking they always know better, on all topics. Which is a not-unusual phenomenon. One version to avoid is when they are the expert on all things, and they think they're only hiring worker drones to save time on things they know better on. * Client is intelligent and constructive. If they're saying technical things that don't make sense, and when you attempt to discuss, to understand and possibly inform, you hit a brick wall, then you might have a lot of brick walls in your future if you take them on as a client. * Client has enough money, is willing to spend it on you, and looks like they'll have enough money for a while. Complementary to this, I of course wouldn't take a contract like, say, someone self-funding a startup, and no matter what I did for them, it didn't look like they'd be viable. * If client is a CS-ish professor (which I bump into probably more than most, since I have a fondness for some aspects/ideals of universities, and live in university neighborhoods)... Only take the client if you can find a situation close to that of a colleague of mine: works with a PI who respects him as both skilled and as a collaborator. It's not uncommon for a CS-ish professor to think they know more about practice than practitioners, and they get some (misleading, incestuous) validation from others in academia. I respect professors by default, and some are close friends, but egos and inaccurate perceptions about the world outside academia seem not-unusual. Also, universities are accustomed to cheap, captive labor (except for select higher-ups, and sometimes endowment hedge fund managers). * Watch out for the casual oracle (I don't know whether there's an existing term?), and also be careful not to be the casual oracle. By which I mean a decision-maker has a friend or someone who they keep going to to check things you tell them, and this person overrules you. Normally, this would be fine, especially as a discussion, but what I'm talking about is like a rogue doctor, who diagnoses patients without ever having examined them, talked with a doctor who has, or even glanced at their ED chart, yet ends up overriding the actual doctors of the patients. I've seen this a few times firsthand (in tech, not with doctors), so it seems to be a thing, and I also had a friend once quit over it. If it's a thing, I don't know whether it's only an artifact of not respecting the person doing the work, or something else. A few times, I've also realized that I was being asked to be the casual oracle, and I tried to be humble and qualify, but now that I recognize this thing, I'll be even more careful.
StavrosK 6y ago
I've had fun replying honestly to bad customers. I run a service where you pay once for a lifetime upgrade, and it doesn't make much money so I don't care very much about dissatisfying bad customers. One of them emailed me with a subject line of "my account is broken! FIX IT!!!" and no body, to which I replied "how rude, do you think I'm your slave?". He replied in the same vein, saying that if I didn't fix it he'd go to a competitor, to which I said "it's a one-time payment and you've already paid me, if you leave you're just basically saving me time in support". He replied a few hours later apologizing for his rudeness and detailing what the problem was, which I helped him fix, but it was fun to see how much customers expect to be able to walk all over customer service and how surprised they are when you don't take their shit. To be fair, 99% of support emails are very kind and polite.
- panpanna 6y ago
  > I run a service where you pay once for a lifetime upgrade, and it doesn't make much money so I don't care very much about dissatisfying bad customers. I don't like this attitude.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Would you prefer I cared deeply about bad customers?
    - panpanna 6y ago
      Customers should not suffer because of your business miscalculations.
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        They suffer because of their own rudeness and inability to extend basic courtesy; the fact that they can't hold future payments over my head as an excuse for their bad manners is just a bonus.
        6y ago
szundi 6y ago
Very good advice. However it is very easy for your employees to misinterpret outraged customer behaviour after firing some of the bad ones. When they think it is a bad customer, they always handle them well, communicate professionally and nicely, and THEN they come to YOU that YOU DECIDE and do something about it. Not them. These occasions are perfect to show them how to distinguish between relevant outrage and a bad client who has a tantrum. If you miss this, your guys can become demotivated by mistake.
francescopnpn 6y ago
I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream. One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions). The bottom of any market is shit.
katzgrau 6y ago
Explain very nicely how you can achieve what your bad customer would like for fee or upgraded plan. In fact, tell them that you'd love to do it but you would need to direct new resources toward that effort. Make sure that fee is a healthy one that will either make them go away or make the effort worth it for you. Win/win.
hn_check 6y ago
These "fire the bad customers" blog entries regurgitate on here with regularity, and it reads like a fan fiction more than an actual description of events. Further some of the examples are terrible. If, for instance, you've made multiple product changes for a free customer, the problem isn't that the free customer exists, it's that you didn't have any check early on against doing that. "Can you change this for me?" "No." Alternately, "Sure, that would be $2750 up front" Etc. Customers bothering you on WhatsApp? Again, maybe the customer isn't the problem...
neya 6y ago
I follow a different strategy. I took over a migration for a multi-million visitor news portal. The person who handed the site over to me architected it so poorly and didn't really share the full details and as a result the migration blew and lead to downtime of about 20 minutes. The client hated me for that. Over the course of the next 3 months, I went over the board to win them back, provided them WhatsApp support and made sure things are re-architected to be more cost efficient and stable. Since then, they've been able to handle 10x the traffic since my engagement with them for the same flat cost. Their competitors are paying easily 5-6x the cost in 1000s of dollars per month. A few weeks ago, the client even offered me to become a CTO in their company. Obviously, as a consultant I value loyalty and so I politely declined. I even handle all their technology side of things, short of being an official CTO. It's one of my greatest success stories and at the same time, it helped me understand that behind all those angry calls, texts, etc. is a frustrated PERSON who needs just emotional confrontation. It's not possible to do this at scale, but, if you only have 1 or 2 bad apples, you can use them to your advantage to gather feedback to improve your product or service. From the author's note, if I paid for a lifetime service, it doesn't mean you're doing me a favor. I'm simply paying what you told me your service is worth. And if you treat me bad because I asked you to fix your broken stuff, that's just so unprofessional. If I asked you for more stuff than what the original product's scope is, you can simply let me know your consulting rates and that is almost like a small investor paying you money to build a feature for your product that's probably useful for other customers as well.
- alchemism 6y ago
  > you can simply let me know your consulting rates and that is almost like a small investor paying you money to build a feature for your product that's probably useful for other customers as well. This defense against attempts at subordination is sensible and professional, but I think it is far from common thinking, in my opinion, among the non-entrepreneurial types that go into Engineering or CS. It is understanding gained for them only after decades of painful experience - if at all.
aniijbod 6y ago
I am deeply concerned when I hear the phrase in the title. Good customers are a unit test our professionalism, our entrepreneurial capabilities as founders and the effectiveness of the processes we implement, whereas bad customers are merely a test our humanity. Ultimately, we know which of those two tests we least want to fail.
davidtranjs 6y ago
Some customers are rude because they dont understand much about software development. If they can listen and learning and have money to pay for you then you can Try continue working with then
tchock23 6y ago
I think it was Seth Godin who coined the term, ‘Choose your customers, choose your life.’ It has stuck with me as good advice to follow since then...
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"A friend of mine serviced an early user of his app during the early days with free customisations. That same user came back asking for more custom features, while being on the FREE plan, and threatened to write a 1 star review if they didn't." Reminds me of Aesop's "Please all and you please none" moral (but applied in a modern-day context to a customer base): https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/648/the-man-the-boy-and-the-donkey/ https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/648/the-man-the-...
hpcjoe 6y ago
I've had terrible customers when I ran my old company. I tried to ignore their behavior and focus upon being a worthwhile group for them to deal with. They tended to share a number of features. 1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources, they never had any intent to work with you on. 2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free consulting. 3) POCs on your kit, demonstrating your performance and cost superiority to other solutions, with again, promises of if the POC went well, they would purchase from you. They refused to sign a contract indicating this. And later the bought very expensive gear from a competitor (about 5x our price) which purportedly did the same thing (it didn't) at the same performance (it didn't). Later reaching out to us to ask us to help re-engineer their purchased solution (we didn't). 4) RFPs that you responded to, and according to the non-purchasing folks, you dominated and won. Later changed by the purchasing people. In one case, a university called me up on my vacation asking me to teach our competitors how to do what we did. Because they didn't want to buy our solution from us. But they wanted our solution. Fire your bad customers. In the case of the university, we simply stopped responding them them after they pulled that crap. I'd get occasional complaints from them and others that they needed me to respond to RFPs so they could get their minimum of 3 offers to compare. We had a non-US government purchasing entity literally change a contract on us because they could, and told us they could, without us agreeing to it. Every single negative interaction wound up being represented in our T&Cs. After a while, some of the larger groups we dealt with complained about our T&Cs. Which weren't one sided, but they were fair to both parties. I am thankful that this provided signals of problematic customers. I'd sit down with the entities lawyers and explain every single clause and why it was there. I helped them understand what were lines what was non-negotiable. Most reasonable entities adapted. The unreasonable ones would insist upon their own terms, which were tremendously risky for us. Almost 4 years since the company was killed, and it's getting a bit easier to write and talk about this.
- acwan93 6y ago
  >1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources, they never had any intent to work with you on. I've heard this too many times from our existing customers too. This sounds like the "do it for exposure!" line of reasoning for artists. >2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free consulting. We had this one customer who always called into our support line (and for some reason got ahold of my personal cell!), and every call ended up being a 2 hour-long consulting session on how to get his business set up for e-commerce and his business strategy. He's went through lots of arrogant Wordpress/website developers that I couldn't stand working with, and still hasn't had a site up after two years. I was so relieved when he decided not to renew his service contact.
tlogan 6y ago
I learned that there are two types of bad customers: - rude customers - customers which are not market/product fit For rude customers, please give them benefit of the doubt: maybe they are just in a bad mood that day. Your support team needs to understand that their job is to help customers to achieve their goal (not to talk about bugs). If you get a multiple rude answers after you try to help them, just cut them (refund and ban). Do not worry about twitter and social media things: only 3% of world population reads it. Do not worry if that customer thinks they are vip (like CEO of some random ‘ycombinator’ company). The successful people are amazingly polite. For bad market/product fit, you need to explain how your product does not fit. Sometimes it is mistake of your sales giving them impression that you can do certain things. This is a hard problem. In short, your customers will eventually define your company: in same way as in bar/restaurant business customers eventually define type of a bar/restaurant.
takinola 6y ago
My worst customers pay the highest rates. I continually increase the bill until an equilibrium is reached between the aggravation they cause and the happiness from my increased profits.
ropable 6y ago
Internal IT support for a government agency here: there are times when I wish I could "fire" some customers, but it's not really possible. On the other hand, being part of the same organisation means that I can be (and have been) quite free with communication to the effect of: "That email tone is not appropriate. We are colleagues in the same organisation with our own set of priorities and demands, and we require to be treated with the same respect as you would."
kerryoco 6y ago
If you have the "nice guy" problem like I did, my rule of thumb is: phrase things in terms of your personal needs. - "I do not have the time to do XYZ, sorry" - "It would cost me too much to do XYZ, sorry" - "This framework does not support XYZ, sorry" These are conversation stoppers. As opposed to: - "I think this goes beyond the scope of our agreement" - "What you are asking is very difficult"

393 points by grwthckrmstr 6y ago

Alternatively, charge them appropriately. I billed at double rate with an one hour minimum for unscheduled phone inquiries. Nothing makes you rich or stops their misbehavior faster than sending a $200 bill for a 2-minute call that was essentially "did you see my email?" Special feature requests were tied to minimum spend contracts.

arp242 6y ago
Did you have a prior agreement for that? I'm not sure if it's either legal or ethical to do that without prior agreement, no matter how difficult they are.
- kenhwang 6y ago
  Yep, if there's no service/support contract I'm not doing customer service/support. Then it's simply minimum time billed and normal/after hours/emergency billing rates and definitions for what is considered an emergency (how much prior notice, how much time to respond). Very typical SLA stuff.
  - arp242 6y ago
    How will people know if they're going to be charged double though?
    - paulcole 6y ago
      It’s defined in the contract.
    - kenhwang 6y ago
      It's a courtesy to let them know the first time. Otherwise each call would be a line item on the month-end invoice with the call subject, the time/length of the call, and amount billed.
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  Without a contract, an invoice is just a piece of paper. The worst thing they can do is not pay it.
  - aronpye 6y ago
    An invoice is a contract, you have to pay them
    - paulcole 6y ago
      As long as terms are set in advance. If they’re not and I call you on the phone for 1 minute and you send me a $200 invoice, I’m not paying it. Sue me and see if the invoice is a contract.
    - tomalpha 6y ago
      I don’t think that’s true. An invoice is just a formal request for payment. It doesn’t itself legitimise that request. Otherwise I could send you an invoice for $1m out of the blue and according to that logic you’d have to pay me. There must have been some agreement, most likely in the form of a contract, in advance, for you to have to pay that invoice. And even then, some companies employ large teams of people whose entire job is trying to avoid or delaying paying invoices in order to improve their cash flow.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      It actually isn't. An agreement with consideration is a contract. (Consideration means something of value is exchanged.) However the agreement is made. It could be on the phone, text, smoke signals, anything. Though if it's denied later you may have a hard time proving the contract was made. Usually an invoice is sent after an agreement. You have to pay those because you already made a contract to pay (written or not, formal or informal), and quite often an invoice provides formality that was lacking before, crystallising the expected amount. The act of paying it generally signifies final agreement to that amount. For business contracts, often an invoice is the first time the buyer sees the exact amount the seller is expecting, because of details that weren't hashed out in advance (no need). For example per-hour freelancing can be like that; the buyer learns the number of hours the seller claims to have worked from the invoice. But people dispute invoices all the time if they aren't expected or differ significantly from the amount expected.
Bootwizard 6y ago
Careful not to go too overboard for this. I won't say the company's name for fear that I may work there one day. At my last job, a large enterprise database provider wouldn't provide any support to us unless we agreed to pay them upwards of $60k a year for a product we weren't going to use. And we weren't exactly a small customer for them either, we just weren't as big as some of their others. Don't become the toxic one yourself!
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  At this point, if you are going to hire Oracle, the proverb of the Frog and the Scorpion applies.
  - Bootwizard 6y ago
    Surprise! It wasn't Oracle :)
    - winrid 6y ago
      MongoDB?
      - RandomBacon 6y ago
        Throwing out names doesn't help. Bootwizard shouldn't have even said it wasn't Oracle.
        true_religion 6y ago
        Technically true, but if they didn’t say it want Oracle then everyone would assume it was. I have never worked with a company that bought Oracle products, but I still have a bad experience from their presale calls.
    - mcv 6y ago
      I've got to admit, that was indeed a surprise. I really hope other DB vendors don't follow Oracle's example into toxic vendorship.
grwthckrmstr 6y ago
I was afraid to try this, because as someone else pointed out, what if they agree and now I'm stuck with a high-paying toxic customer. Yikes!
- eitland 6y ago
  @200 an hour, billed by the hour and counting from the first minute they have to be particularly toxic. Still I guess you should have your terms and conditions carefully though out.
  - thomasfedb 6y ago
    Irritation factor is an important billing metric. I very rarely say no to a job, I just price so that I'll be happy if they accept.
  - ecpottinger 6y ago
    When I did service call, we had a minimal charge for travel time (1 hour) with 1 hour increments. That way when they call for an service call where they were you knew it usually was important. Of-course, I did have one call that took me only 5 minutes to drive to the site and the three minutes to change the toner in the printer. The executive secretary who would not talk to me over the phone because she was so important suddenly found she would have to explain a two hour service call (1 hour travel, 1 minimum service time) to her boss. :)
- kenhwang 6y ago
  If you're truly stuck, then make it a certainty. That's where those $60k/yr upfront+overages support contracts come in handy and how a customer singlehanded funded your helpdesk team. Very few rich customers aren't a handful. Let them make you rich first, then if you're lucky, you'd be surprised how quickly you outgrow them and have all sorts of tools at your disposal to deal with them.
- paulcole 6y ago
  You’re not stuck with them longer than the terms of the contract. Leave an out and use it if the $200 1-minute phone calls aren’t worth it.
ganafagol 6y ago
And nothing pushes your app into oblivion faster than the bad reviews that you'll get in response. Be polite instead.
hnarn 6y ago
> Alternatively, charge them appropriately. A somewhat smarter pricing model, in my own opinion, is rather than charging someone $200 for a phone call, sell them "coupons" in advance where one coupon equals one support contact. When they have used up N percent of their available coupons, send them an automated e-mail and tell them that future contacts will be denied unless coupons are available. This way, you get the money up front, which is good. Customers that don't contact you a lot are also happy, because they won't need to "re-fill" for a long time -- and annoying customers that call you just to check if you got an e-mail will burn through their coupons in no time. This way, there is no explicit cost for a single phone call that can be challenged by the customer, it's simply an objective way of charging "support contacts", and it's up to the customer to minimize those contacts if they want to save money. What constitutes a contact is up to you, but in my mind it would make sense to classify "ticket creation" (not replies) or "phone call" both as separate contacts. This also makes tickets "worth" way more than a phone call, so you incentivize people to stop calling unless absolutely necessary.

drchiu 6y ago

I’ve used this trick in the past. More than a few times the bad customer tries to quickly do a 180 and be superficially apologetic to prolong the relationship. Unfortunately, behaving in this way, at least in their minds, represents an effective strategy for getting what they want. I’d be curious to hear what others have done in these cases? Raise prices even more? Refer to competitors?

grwthckrmstr 6y ago
Haha! I've had this exact same experience where one such bad customer became apologetic (especially when the found that alternative apps were bad) and stopped complaining.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
Raising prices on the customer can sometimes be a passive aggressive way out — you’re trying to force them to leave, but the downside is some people will pay and continue to be toxic and now you’re stuck with a high paying toxic customer; that’s the nightmare, a customer who sucks but brings in too much money to shitcan. I’d be in favor of a referral. I’m a direct person, so I might say something to someone like, “I recognize that you might think that you need to do [x-behavior] in order to get attention and support; you have probably had to do that in the past to get service. I need you to understand that this won’t be successful in our working relationship and that my business will not be beholden to [x,y,z]. If we are to continue working together, we need to have very clear communication about what services are in and out of scope that we can both agree to. If we can do that, I’m happy to keep working with you and will do my best to support your needs. If we can’t, I’m happy to refer you to some places that might be a better fit.”
- grwthckrmstr 6y ago
  "but the downside is some people will pay and continue to be toxic and now you’re stuck with a high paying toxic customer" I totally hear you and this fear stopped us from charging extra from a toxic customer. "What if they said yes?"
  - 6y ago

MattGaiser 6y ago

A startup I know was basically killed by this (COVID was the main cause, but this was a large straw that absorbed a ton of time just before the pandemic). Over a month was spent caving to every inane request of this one customer and the only reason they did it was because the customer was willing to pay $250 and they were the first non-institutional paying customer so they were obsessed with getting it right. 5 figure a month contracts that were soon to start but paused due to the pandemic went unserviced so that large parts of the product could be rewritten to serve this one person as though they were the expert on what non institutional customers wanted. And in the end they wanted nothing more than a custom Craigslist type of ad, just with their own custom style and everything. Could have spent that month protecting the large contracts.

grwthckrmstr 6y ago
Ouch! That must have hurt. I totally get that when someone has 0 or only a handful of customers, trying to service one that's showing interest (but being demanding) feels like the natural thing to do. But more often than not, the end outcome isn't favourable. A friend of mine serviced an early user of his app during the early days with free customisations. That same user came back asking for more custom features, while being on the FREE plan, and threatened to write a 1 star review if they didn't. Toxic.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  How did that all end with your friend? Was he able to fire him?
  - grwthckrmstr 6y ago
    Actually, I had this conversation 2 days ago and haven't heard back since. That combined with my own experiences prompted me to write the blog post. I'm going to follow up and report back. Update: His reply - "Fired politely!"
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

timavr 6y ago

Bad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA. Also early there is not enough data to know who are the bad customers or who customers who are having real problems, they all look the same. The best way to deal with them is just to be honest: "This is not on our roadmap, yes we know issues exists. Here is link to issues forum" Public issues forum helps a lot, because if issue doesn't have upvotes or comments, they can reason that chances for developers getting to it is nearly zero. Especially for anything below non pure enterprise 100k+ per customer, there is no way team can address even 2% of issues if there is even hint of PMF. Even for massive companies like Atlassian and Unity there are public feature requests that have thousands of upvotes and they just don't do them because it is not on the roadmap.

plasma 6y ago
nitpick: If I’ve reached out to support with a problem or idea, don’t tell me to repost it to an idea forum you have, do that for me, I’ve already told you about it. I’ve often given up at that point when I’m asked to do this. edit: agree with the rest of your post :)
- anonytrary 6y ago
  I don't like this either and frankly, it's embarrassing when billion-dollar companies have poor support UX. Like why is the burden on the customer to re-submit their report? This is obviously an internal communications problem that should 100% be solved by the company, and they're just displaying how badly they haven't solved the problem yet. edit: I like the rest of OP's
  - Kiro 6y ago
    There's no obligation to listen to user feedback. I get over a hundred feature requests from users a month but I don't even respond to most of them.
    - anonytrary 6y ago
      I don't think anyone was saying that, but yes and no. There is a difference between people telling you there's a fire in your house vs. people telling you what furniture you should get. Bug reports and feature requests should be treated as different beasts in customer support flows. In any case, it depends on what service you're providing or what product you're selling, whether or not the reports are high-value and would impact the success of your business, what the they're about, etc. The onus is on the company to determine these things for themselves. The only reason I can think of for redirecting a user is if you're using it as some sort of quality control barrier to weed out the low quality and non-essential reports.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

One of the important lessons I learned when I was building websites/doing digital strategy consulting (and this was over a decade ago) was to charge more. I was hesitant to do this because starting out, you want to attract customers and you think being competitive and having low prices is the answer. That can work to an extent, but what I found was that all of my clients who I was charging low rates were demanding, needy, and wanted far more than they were paying for. They were terrible. When I raised my rates, the clients I got were much better. No more insane calls at all hours. No more requests for stuff never in the initial SOW. No more threats of finding someone else even cheaper to do it. It’s often hard to know who is a bad customer at the beginning, but once you figure it out, unless the customer is legitimately responsible for a massive part of your business, I agree, fire them. And if the bad customer is responsible for so much of your business you can’t fire them, start looking for a replacement set of customers so that you can work to do that.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
The bottom end of any market is a cesspit, both for buyers and sellers. I suspect it's the same at the top as well although I have little experience there. I've done quite a few projects for distribution companies, these are intermediaries selling stuff on very low margins, basically warehouses with a call centre. To survive they have to become obsessive over costs. They can't turn that cost cutting mentality off even when they are buying services rather than 10 million transistors or whatever they need. This makes them thoroughly miserable places to work. Amazon is an example but on a massive scale.
- francescopnpn 6y ago
  I agree. But amazon has AWS too which is high-end. I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream. One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions)
  - 6y ago

shrimpx 6y ago

This article implies that you should fire customers who are bad as in demanding, annoying, toxic, high maintenance. But I don’t think it’s so straightforward. If the customer is faang and they pay a multimillion recurring contract, this guy will most likely swallow his discomforts and keep serving. That customer is not so “bad.” So the title should really be “get rid of customers who are bad for the business,” which is self evident.

kqr 6y ago
I think the point is more that it's easy to overestimate the value customers provide to the business. A customer that is paying an average amount but require 5x as much time as an average customer might not be considered "bad for the business" as long as they financially work out. What's usually missing from that line of reasoning is the opportunity cost of supporting that one customer instead of five others that are more average in demand.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
Well, I think this is written from the perspective of people who don’t have FAANG clients. I totally agree that when you do, the situation changes completely. There is an argument to be made that for a smaller/normal customer, the power balance between corporation and customer is about equal. Both have the right to fire each other and if the customer is toxic or takes more time to support than could be focused on something else, you should fire them. But the power dynamic changes once you start talking about big money. If you have a client that is responsible for 3/4 of your revenue, toxicity or not, firing them is easier said than done. And the bigger clients (FAANG types) know this too. There, I think the trick is to try to make the statement of work as clear as possible. The one thing about a FAANG client to remember is that not all accounts are created equal. If it’s not a six figure contract, just because you have a deal with someone from Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net doesn’t mean they can’t be fired. (It also doesn’t mean they have huge money or that your sales team can extort them. I had a podcast hosting provider try to upsell my zero-budget initiative into an enterprise plan my insanely low-volume podcast didn’t need by half-threatening to cut us off, just because I worked at a large media company. Needless to say, I fired them.)
6y ago

Proven 6y ago

Nice to see this upvoted considering all the whining here on HN about evictions. Something could be said about double standards but I'll leave that to others.

reillyse 6y ago

Maybe I’m just showing my age but this is a rehash of a very old idea. I’m pretty sure it’s in the 4 hour work week, which while largely a fantasy still had some decent ideas.

njsubedi 6y ago

From the perspective of a mobile app/game developer, I’d say developers who sell apps on the app stores aren’t so lucky. You need to respond, and resolve issues of each and every customer, otherwise get bombarded with a bunch of negative reviews from accounts of everyone they know. Just like the recent fate of TikTok app, but in a smaller scale. One time a single customer nearly took our business down by writing 1 star reviews every day for weeks about how we fucked him over with a paid app (that was $4.99) and that we were scamming because we didn’t fully refund him for the service he used for a month. The review highlights would only show his reviews so download and sale dropped, competitor ranked #1 from #2 .. and it was one hell of an experience. One day that guy stopped rating our app, and things started getting better. Yeah, it’s a bad idea to put the fate of your business in a single app, but we were just starting out. This happened because we kinda fired our one customer. From that day, everyone who asks for a refund even after using up the services gets a refund. Feature requests go to a voting arena; so far so good. We’re not sinking now.

grwthckrmstr 6y ago
That sounds horrible, and I can relate. Shopify store owners who are bad customers can also hold you hostage by posting a 1 star review (unless you meet their demands). Like you highlighted, it's even worse on mobile app stores as it's easy for them to get their friends to leave bad ratings. Great that you survived and grew out stronger from the experience :)
m463 6y ago
I remember reading the four hour work week years ago, and he said something like refund no questions asked. Look, amazon offers refunds when people send back a brick instead of a computer and jeff bezos is rich enough to compete in the space race 2.0
- mcny 6y ago
  > Look, amazon offers refunds when people send back a brick instead of a computer and jeff bezos is rich enough to compete in the space race 2.0 I don’t do this. Not because I am a good person with morals but because I’m scared of being banned from Amazon.com Amazon.com can easily track what items I looked at and what items I place on my cart. What’s to stop them from tracking what items I return?

gitgud 6y ago

A "bad customer" is generally just a client who annoys you... in many cases it's a misunderstanding of how easy things are, or how much effort you're going to for them. Simply conveying the effort and time you're expending for them (very politely), helps them appreciate your business and temper their expectations...

hhas01 6y ago
“A "bad customer" is generally just a client who annoys you” Nonsense. A bad customer is one that costs your company more to service than it earns back in revenue. It’s simple arithmetic. Maybe they don’t bother to pay their bills. Maybe they run you ragged with endless change requests. Maybe they repeatedly start new projects then, just as you’ve done all the prep work, put them “on hold”. Maybe they string you along with promises of “big projects” coming down the pipeline that never actually arrive. Whatever it is, every hour you sink on them is an hour not spent on a customer that is profitable. The article may be thin, but it’s absolutely right: get rid of those assholes ASAP, and then fix your own damn processes so you don’t get screwed again. Otherwise they’ll drag you down and drain your business for you.
- hhas01 6y ago
  I find it slightly amusing that somebody downvoted this, considering I speak from hard-learned experience here.
Baeocystin 6y ago
You've had better experiences than I, then. Most of my clients have been quite enjoyable to work with, and that's great. But the difficult customers that expect everything immediately... They are very resistant to caring about how much effort it takes on your part, or engaging in actual two-way conversation. They appear to be only focused on themselves, to a self-defeating degree.

monadic2 6y ago

Man if only you could become a capitalist through some other means than being a capitalist to begin with.

grwthckrmstr 6y ago
Don't hate the player hate the game :D

nabla9 6y ago

These articles are like women's magazine articles for entrepreneurs. No substance. Just a simple story and obvious suggestion from some influencer. No real substance. How is this top in HN?

matsemann 6y ago
Because the discussion is worth having?
- nabla9 6y ago
  I must admit that 'business as a lifestyle' is somewhat alien concept to me, so the relatively unsubstantial business bantering for entertainment seems strange.
  - unishark 6y ago
    I think you missed the point. The discussion is about how to handle problematic customers, which is worth having even if the linked article had little to contribute to it. It's not a lifestyle; it's people seeking and giving advice. Such advice can be a very helpful thing with direct financial implications.
neilv 6y ago
I think I know what you mean, that, historically, there's been a stereotype of "women's magazines", and you were using it as a familiar illustration. I propose that we figure out different illustrations. We can see similar, if less-recognized, patterns in many publications labeled as for "men", "lifetyle", "health", "technology", "news", etc. We've been calling them "women's magazines" so long, and I assume that, before I was born, society let magazine publishers frame how we call and think of the magazine, and its implied assertions about women. Today, with publishing opened up more, and even literal children posturing as broadcast "influencers", that some of the dynamics of publisher as often posturer, manipulator, and exploiter are more transparent to us. I don't know how to solve this, and it seems to be many different problems. But I'm thinking that one thing we can do about it (and certainly this is far from a novel idea, including in this particular space), is to reject manipulative terms and labels that self-interested parties try to force on us.

walrus01 6y ago

ISP perspective: Always have an ironclad definition in your service contracts and terms of service where the demarcation point is between your CPE at a customer's premises, and their LAN. Problems on one side of that demarc are your problem. Problems on the other side are not.

garyclarke27 6y ago

When I had an ERP & CRM Reseller business, most customers were reasonable but a significant few were bullies. I found the best way to deal with them is to be tough back, to say no to unreasonable requests, to charge even more than to other customers and remind them that they are always free to go elsewhere, I had several screaming swearing calls as a result, but the strange thing is, they rarely left and they paid in full.

patman81 6y ago

Once you decide to "fire a customer", it may not be easy to get thru that process. It can be tricky if the cancellation started on the side of the software provider. We run an enterprise saas business and at one point decided we can't work with a particular customer anymore. We informed the customer that we will terminate his service and cancel all his outstanding (unpaid) invoices. Soon after that, the customer started to take legal action against our company. It was quite an ordeal for about 12 months. At least it helped us improve our contracts and legal processes going forward. However, since than we are careful to vet new potential customers before we offer our software. If we feel the software isn't a good fit, we will tell the customer and work thru our concerns before signing a contract. Even if we may lose some potential customers in the process, it builds a more healthy and sustainable business. "Avoid toxic customers." Is now part of our handbook.

csydas 6y ago
This works if your business model allows you to be selective, but for many companies (big and small) you don't get to choose your customers. Even worse, a lot of times it's not fully bad customers, it's a bad customer attached to an otherwise benign entity that refuses to acknowledge the behavior of the bad customer. This is exacerbated for big businesses because typically the sales team and the product team are not working directly together except for POCs, and the discussions that a Sales team has and a Product Team has are very different. It's not even about technical competency most of the time from the Sales Team (my experience is they usually know just about what they should for the role, and smart Sales folk know when to stop and ask instead of making promises they can't keep), but rather that typically who the Sales team talks with is not the bad customer, but higher decision makers who just get a generalized feedback from the actual bad customer within their company. The nit-picky and vicious activities are abstracted out into some more generalized and calmer statements when delivered to decision-makers/Sales, and it can be very difficult to get any traction on such bad customers. I deal with these situations exclusively and it's time consuming and exhausting. Cheap legal threats aren't even the worst part (fun trick when you get a compensation request, just ask for detailed documentation on how they arrived at such a number; most times this is enough to shut down such requests as the number is just something they've pulled out of the air because "it sounded good" during a meeting), but instead that most of the time what you're dealing with "family problems" from these customers, and these are problems they just don't want to deal with personally. Business is weird.

P4wl0w 6y ago

This is some serious and good advice for doing business and also managing personal relationships. Do not fear to say 'No!' and do not try to be everyone's darling. I had to learn this the hard way because of exactly the same eagerness to do business and take up on all opportunities. My advice is to regularly reflect on your (business) relationships and evaluate them (good, ok, bad) and sort out everyone who just gives you more pain than value. Of course 'value' in business is not only profit but also a good relationship to your customer and wanting to do the job rather than wanting to do another one. In personal life 'value' can be that someone accepts you as you are and/or tells you their honest opinion even if you do not like what you hear. You will have to define your own meaning of 'value' to evaluate these relationships.

speleding 6y ago

Telling a bad customer they are sucking up too much support time may make them even angrier. In our support system we have a little flag for such customers (we use it rarely): instead of telling them outright they are too needy we wait a day before replying to them.

epx 6y ago
Exponential back off, use this technique all the time

neilv 6y ago

In the past, being an independent consultant for around a decade, I let 2-3 clients go. One of those, letting the client go turned out to be a huge mistake, since the reasons turned out to be a temporary blip. In so many words, the great executive later returned, some things that were concerning/unacceptable while the exec was away were presumably reversed, but I'd already moved on. Another, they just had an unsalvagable massive mess of a code base that an undergrad made, and they didn't appreciate how bad it was, and that it needed more than incremental work. Before and after the regretted cut-loose client, I also didn't take on at least a few clients who I had misgivings about. Some of those were probably due to once-bitten, twice-shy. Some problems I've learned to avoid, and I'll phrase them here as positives (I've found both the negative and positive examples): * Clients who realize they need more than a low-end programmer. Like many people, I have a lot of experience working higher-end than that, * Client respects you as an expert or competent professional. That doesn't mean they defer to you automatically. What you want to avoid are situations like someone key at the client thinking they always know better, on all topics. Which is a not-unusual phenomenon. One version to avoid is when they are the expert on all things, and they think they're only hiring worker drones to save time on things they know better on. * Client is intelligent and constructive. If they're saying technical things that don't make sense, and when you attempt to discuss, to understand and possibly inform, you hit a brick wall, then you might have a lot of brick walls in your future if you take them on as a client. * Client has enough money, is willing to spend it on you, and looks like they'll have enough money for a while. Complementary to this, I of course wouldn't take a contract like, say, someone self-funding a startup, and no matter what I did for them, it didn't look like they'd be viable. * If client is a CS-ish professor (which I bump into probably more than most, since I have a fondness for some aspects/ideals of universities, and live in university neighborhoods)... Only take the client if you can find a situation close to that of a colleague of mine: works with a PI who respects him as both skilled and as a collaborator. It's not uncommon for a CS-ish professor to think they know more about practice than practitioners, and they get some (misleading, incestuous) validation from others in academia. I respect professors by default, and some are close friends, but egos and inaccurate perceptions about the world outside academia seem not-unusual. Also, universities are accustomed to cheap, captive labor (except for select higher-ups, and sometimes endowment hedge fund managers). * Watch out for the casual oracle (I don't know whether there's an existing term?), and also be careful not to be the casual oracle. By which I mean a decision-maker has a friend or someone who they keep going to to check things you tell them, and this person overrules you. Normally, this would be fine, especially as a discussion, but what I'm talking about is like a rogue doctor, who diagnoses patients without ever having examined them, talked with a doctor who has, or even glanced at their ED chart, yet ends up overriding the actual doctors of the patients. I've seen this a few times firsthand (in tech, not with doctors), so it seems to be a thing, and I also had a friend once quit over it. If it's a thing, I don't know whether it's only an artifact of not respecting the person doing the work, or something else. A few times, I've also realized that I was being asked to be the casual oracle, and I tried to be humble and qualify, but now that I recognize this thing, I'll be even more careful.

StavrosK 6y ago

I've had fun replying honestly to bad customers. I run a service where you pay once for a lifetime upgrade, and it doesn't make much money so I don't care very much about dissatisfying bad customers. One of them emailed me with a subject line of "my account is broken! FIX IT!!!" and no body, to which I replied "how rude, do you think I'm your slave?". He replied in the same vein, saying that if I didn't fix it he'd go to a competitor, to which I said "it's a one-time payment and you've already paid me, if you leave you're just basically saving me time in support". He replied a few hours later apologizing for his rudeness and detailing what the problem was, which I helped him fix, but it was fun to see how much customers expect to be able to walk all over customer service and how surprised they are when you don't take their shit. To be fair, 99% of support emails are very kind and polite.

panpanna 6y ago
> I run a service where you pay once for a lifetime upgrade, and it doesn't make much money so I don't care very much about dissatisfying bad customers. I don't like this attitude.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Would you prefer I cared deeply about bad customers?
  - panpanna 6y ago
    Customers should not suffer because of your business miscalculations.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      They suffer because of their own rudeness and inability to extend basic courtesy; the fact that they can't hold future payments over my head as an excuse for their bad manners is just a bonus.
      - 6y ago

szundi 6y ago

Very good advice. However it is very easy for your employees to misinterpret outraged customer behaviour after firing some of the bad ones. When they think it is a bad customer, they always handle them well, communicate professionally and nicely, and THEN they come to YOU that YOU DECIDE and do something about it. Not them. These occasions are perfect to show them how to distinguish between relevant outrage and a bad client who has a tantrum. If you miss this, your guys can become demotivated by mistake.

francescopnpn 6y ago

I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream. One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions). The bottom of any market is shit.

katzgrau 6y ago

Explain very nicely how you can achieve what your bad customer would like for fee or upgraded plan. In fact, tell them that you'd love to do it but you would need to direct new resources toward that effort. Make sure that fee is a healthy one that will either make them go away or make the effort worth it for you. Win/win.

hn_check 6y ago

These "fire the bad customers" blog entries regurgitate on here with regularity, and it reads like a fan fiction more than an actual description of events. Further some of the examples are terrible. If, for instance, you've made multiple product changes for a free customer, the problem isn't that the free customer exists, it's that you didn't have any check early on against doing that. "Can you change this for me?" "No." Alternately, "Sure, that would be $2750 up front" Etc. Customers bothering you on WhatsApp? Again, maybe the customer isn't the problem...

neya 6y ago

I follow a different strategy. I took over a migration for a multi-million visitor news portal. The person who handed the site over to me architected it so poorly and didn't really share the full details and as a result the migration blew and lead to downtime of about 20 minutes. The client hated me for that. Over the course of the next 3 months, I went over the board to win them back, provided them WhatsApp support and made sure things are re-architected to be more cost efficient and stable. Since then, they've been able to handle 10x the traffic since my engagement with them for the same flat cost. Their competitors are paying easily 5-6x the cost in 1000s of dollars per month. A few weeks ago, the client even offered me to become a CTO in their company. Obviously, as a consultant I value loyalty and so I politely declined. I even handle all their technology side of things, short of being an official CTO. It's one of my greatest success stories and at the same time, it helped me understand that behind all those angry calls, texts, etc. is a frustrated PERSON who needs just emotional confrontation. It's not possible to do this at scale, but, if you only have 1 or 2 bad apples, you can use them to your advantage to gather feedback to improve your product or service. From the author's note, if I paid for a lifetime service, it doesn't mean you're doing me a favor. I'm simply paying what you told me your service is worth. And if you treat me bad because I asked you to fix your broken stuff, that's just so unprofessional. If I asked you for more stuff than what the original product's scope is, you can simply let me know your consulting rates and that is almost like a small investor paying you money to build a feature for your product that's probably useful for other customers as well.

alchemism 6y ago
> you can simply let me know your consulting rates and that is almost like a small investor paying you money to build a feature for your product that's probably useful for other customers as well. This defense against attempts at subordination is sensible and professional, but I think it is far from common thinking, in my opinion, among the non-entrepreneurial types that go into Engineering or CS. It is understanding gained for them only after decades of painful experience - if at all.

aniijbod 6y ago

I am deeply concerned when I hear the phrase in the title. Good customers are a unit test our professionalism, our entrepreneurial capabilities as founders and the effectiveness of the processes we implement, whereas bad customers are merely a test our humanity. Ultimately, we know which of those two tests we least want to fail.

davidtranjs 6y ago

Some customers are rude because they dont understand much about software development. If they can listen and learning and have money to pay for you then you can Try continue working with then

tchock23 6y ago

I think it was Seth Godin who coined the term, ‘Choose your customers, choose your life.’ It has stuck with me as good advice to follow since then...

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"A friend of mine serviced an early user of his app during the early days with free customisations. That same user came back asking for more custom features, while being on the FREE plan, and threatened to write a 1 star review if they didn't." Reminds me of Aesop's "Please all and you please none" moral (but applied in a modern-day context to a customer base): https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/648/the-man-the-boy-and-the-donkey/ https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/648/the-man-the-...

hpcjoe 6y ago

I've had terrible customers when I ran my old company. I tried to ignore their behavior and focus upon being a worthwhile group for them to deal with. They tended to share a number of features. 1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources, they never had any intent to work with you on. 2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free consulting. 3) POCs on your kit, demonstrating your performance and cost superiority to other solutions, with again, promises of if the POC went well, they would purchase from you. They refused to sign a contract indicating this. And later the bought very expensive gear from a competitor (about 5x our price) which purportedly did the same thing (it didn't) at the same performance (it didn't). Later reaching out to us to ask us to help re-engineer their purchased solution (we didn't). 4) RFPs that you responded to, and according to the non-purchasing folks, you dominated and won. Later changed by the purchasing people. In one case, a university called me up on my vacation asking me to teach our competitors how to do what we did. Because they didn't want to buy our solution from us. But they wanted our solution. Fire your bad customers. In the case of the university, we simply stopped responding them them after they pulled that crap. I'd get occasional complaints from them and others that they needed me to respond to RFPs so they could get their minimum of 3 offers to compare. We had a non-US government purchasing entity literally change a contract on us because they could, and told us they could, without us agreeing to it. Every single negative interaction wound up being represented in our T&Cs. After a while, some of the larger groups we dealt with complained about our T&Cs. Which weren't one sided, but they were fair to both parties. I am thankful that this provided signals of problematic customers. I'd sit down with the entities lawyers and explain every single clause and why it was there. I helped them understand what were lines what was non-negotiable. Most reasonable entities adapted. The unreasonable ones would insist upon their own terms, which were tremendously risky for us. Almost 4 years since the company was killed, and it's getting a bit easier to write and talk about this.

acwan93 6y ago
>1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources, they never had any intent to work with you on. I've heard this too many times from our existing customers too. This sounds like the "do it for exposure!" line of reasoning for artists. >2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free consulting. We had this one customer who always called into our support line (and for some reason got ahold of my personal cell!), and every call ended up being a 2 hour-long consulting session on how to get his business set up for e-commerce and his business strategy. He's went through lots of arrogant Wordpress/website developers that I couldn't stand working with, and still hasn't had a site up after two years. I was so relieved when he decided not to renew his service contact.

tlogan 6y ago

I learned that there are two types of bad customers: - rude customers - customers which are not market/product fit For rude customers, please give them benefit of the doubt: maybe they are just in a bad mood that day. Your support team needs to understand that their job is to help customers to achieve their goal (not to talk about bugs). If you get a multiple rude answers after you try to help them, just cut them (refund and ban). Do not worry about twitter and social media things: only 3% of world population reads it. Do not worry if that customer thinks they are vip (like CEO of some random ‘ycombinator’ company). The successful people are amazingly polite. For bad market/product fit, you need to explain how your product does not fit. Sometimes it is mistake of your sales giving them impression that you can do certain things. This is a hard problem. In short, your customers will eventually define your company: in same way as in bar/restaurant business customers eventually define type of a bar/restaurant.

takinola 6y ago

My worst customers pay the highest rates. I continually increase the bill until an equilibrium is reached between the aggravation they cause and the happiness from my increased profits.

ropable 6y ago

Internal IT support for a government agency here: there are times when I wish I could "fire" some customers, but it's not really possible. On the other hand, being part of the same organisation means that I can be (and have been) quite free with communication to the effect of: "That email tone is not appropriate. We are colleagues in the same organisation with our own set of priorities and demands, and we require to be treated with the same respect as you would."

kerryoco 6y ago

If you have the "nice guy" problem like I did, my rule of thumb is: phrase things in terms of your personal needs. - "I do not have the time to do XYZ, sorry" - "It would cost me too much to do XYZ, sorry" - "This framework does not support XYZ, sorry" These are conversation stoppers. As opposed to: - "I think this goes beyond the scope of our agreement" - "What you are asking is very difficult"