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Yes and no. A customer who complains to you is doing you a favor by letting you know how your product fell short of their expectations. That's an opportunity to

by Zanni 6y ago

Yes and no. A customer who complains to you is doing you a favor by letting you know how your product fell short of their expectations. That's an opportunity to either 1) improve the product or 2) clarify the customer's expectations. But a customer who takes their grievance to social media immediately is a troublemaker who's not worth the grief. The CEO was right to "fire" him as a customer (but he should have been civil about it and not deleted his work without notice).

tchaffee 6y ago
Plenty of good customers take a grievance to social media immediately. We are emotional animals. If you are using angry tweets as your signal for what makes a bad customer, you're going to lose a lot of good customers to the competition willing to see past the initial emotions and get to the root of the problem. Solving your customers' problems is pretty much what keeps you in business.
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  Taking grievances to social media immediately is generally wise because it is often the only way to solve an issue (sadly). In addition it warns the other potential customers of the issue.
Aeolun 6y ago
> The CEO was right to "fire" him as a customer He wasn’t right at all. The customer was still paying, and was still making use of the service. Why in hells name did he take that twitter post to mean that the customer wanted to cancel.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Negative feedback is how I improve stuff. I mention the value of negative feedback, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/#feedback https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...
csydas 6y ago
A single complaint means you're a bad customer? It's bad PR for sure, but as far as customers go, this is extremely minor. "Firing" this customer more convinces me the CEO just has no idea how to handle criticism for their product or how to explain their aggressive revenue model, and yes, the policy is aggressive. We had to revisit the licensing model for our company a few times over the last years, and it was a huge headache; people whined, loudly and rightfully, cause we did have a bit of a crappy change up. No one "lost" anything in the changeup, but there were headaches for sure. Our PM handled it like a champ as we had a lot of public outcries; some valid, which we took on the nose, others not so valid where we called out the wrongful arguments. We never "fired" anyone as a result of our business decision though; that's not a way to build trust in others. If our decisions ultimately makes someone part with us, let it be their decision, not ours. We save firing for only the truly most abusive and disruptive customers who eat up support/dev time needlessly (and I do mean needlessly, like demanding the attention of our best support engineers to show them which button to click, which is far too common in big IT companies with supposed IT professionals) Ghost's CEO seems like he couldn't handle the mildest of criticisms from one fo the most common types of customers -- ones who didn't RTFM. His decision wasn't right in the least bit, it was an example that he has no idea how to handle conflict.
- subpixel 6y ago
  The Ghost CEO did precisely the wrong thing. But anyone who has had to support thousands of customers can spot this customer as toxic. The irony here is that the toxic customer gave the CEO the solution: restrict functionality so users don’t get surprised.
  - csydas 6y ago
    I deal with our company's 500k+ customers - this tweet would have been a 5 minute email and maybe a slightly short term discount to resolve, perhaps a quick 'mea culpa, we weren't clear; how could we have made part of the TOS more visible for you?' and follow up with a request for input on which situations the customer feels shouldn't be subject to the fee increase (e.g., a temporary viral article as they mentioned) The article author's complaint barely registers for me as this is something I handle daily; I cannot even imagine the scale you're judging on if this is a toxic customer for you.
jchw 6y ago
Firing a customer over social media disagreements is a worse PR problem than the original post.
threatofrain 6y ago
Similarly, if a customer complains about Apple or Google, in a way that's "immediately" to social media, you think they're a troublemaker who isn't worth the grief and it'd be right if the CEO fires them as a customer?

by Zanni 6y ago

tchaffee 6y ago

Plenty of good customers take a grievance to social media immediately. We are emotional animals. If you are using angry tweets as your signal for what makes a bad customer, you're going to lose a lot of good customers to the competition willing to see past the initial emotions and get to the root of the problem. Solving your customers' problems is pretty much what keeps you in business.

dependenttypes 6y ago
Taking grievances to social media immediately is generally wise because it is often the only way to solve an issue (sadly). In addition it warns the other potential customers of the issue.

Aeolun 6y ago

> The CEO was right to "fire" him as a customer He wasn’t right at all. The customer was still paying, and was still making use of the service. Why in hells name did he take that twitter post to mean that the customer wanted to cancel.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Negative feedback is how I improve stuff. I mention the value of negative feedback, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/#feedback https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...

csydas 6y ago

A single complaint means you're a bad customer? It's bad PR for sure, but as far as customers go, this is extremely minor. "Firing" this customer more convinces me the CEO just has no idea how to handle criticism for their product or how to explain their aggressive revenue model, and yes, the policy is aggressive. We had to revisit the licensing model for our company a few times over the last years, and it was a huge headache; people whined, loudly and rightfully, cause we did have a bit of a crappy change up. No one "lost" anything in the changeup, but there were headaches for sure. Our PM handled it like a champ as we had a lot of public outcries; some valid, which we took on the nose, others not so valid where we called out the wrongful arguments. We never "fired" anyone as a result of our business decision though; that's not a way to build trust in others. If our decisions ultimately makes someone part with us, let it be their decision, not ours. We save firing for only the truly most abusive and disruptive customers who eat up support/dev time needlessly (and I do mean needlessly, like demanding the attention of our best support engineers to show them which button to click, which is far too common in big IT companies with supposed IT professionals) Ghost's CEO seems like he couldn't handle the mildest of criticisms from one fo the most common types of customers -- ones who didn't RTFM. His decision wasn't right in the least bit, it was an example that he has no idea how to handle conflict.

subpixel 6y ago
The Ghost CEO did precisely the wrong thing. But anyone who has had to support thousands of customers can spot this customer as toxic. The irony here is that the toxic customer gave the CEO the solution: restrict functionality so users don’t get surprised.
- csydas 6y ago
  I deal with our company's 500k+ customers - this tweet would have been a 5 minute email and maybe a slightly short term discount to resolve, perhaps a quick 'mea culpa, we weren't clear; how could we have made part of the TOS more visible for you?' and follow up with a request for input on which situations the customer feels shouldn't be subject to the fee increase (e.g., a temporary viral article as they mentioned) The article author's complaint barely registers for me as this is something I handle daily; I cannot even imagine the scale you're judging on if this is a toxic customer for you.

jchw 6y ago

Firing a customer over social media disagreements is a worse PR problem than the original post.

threatofrain 6y ago

Similarly, if a customer complains about Apple or Google, in a way that's "immediately" to social media, you think they're a troublemaker who isn't worth the grief and it'd be right if the CEO fires them as a customer?