4 ms·

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 convince

by 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.
  - nacs 6y ago
    As someone who has and still run a SaaS product, I’m amazed at the number of HN people saying this is a toxic/bad customer. This is an incredibly low bar for “toxic”. Apparently for some here, making a post where he made a legitimate complaint made him toxic just because it’s on Twitter? Twitter has become a standard way for some people to communicate with companies or to vent frustrations whether you like it or not. Deal with it instead of calling them an “ahole”.
    - csydas 6y ago
      Well I'm not sure if I consider the complaint legitimate (it legitimately is a complaint, but I'm not sure how valid it is ;) ) but I agree this is normal now. This is how people vent. A few minutes to just absorb the venting for something everyone complains about (pricing) goes a long way at very little cost

by csydas 6y ago

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.
- nacs 6y ago
  As someone who has and still run a SaaS product, I’m amazed at the number of HN people saying this is a toxic/bad customer. This is an incredibly low bar for “toxic”. Apparently for some here, making a post where he made a legitimate complaint made him toxic just because it’s on Twitter? Twitter has become a standard way for some people to communicate with companies or to vent frustrations whether you like it or not. Deal with it instead of calling them an “ahole”.
  - csydas 6y ago
    Well I'm not sure if I consider the complaint legitimate (it legitimately is a complaint, but I'm not sure how valid it is ;) ) but I agree this is normal now. This is how people vent. A few minutes to just absorb the venting for something everyone complains about (pricing) goes a long way at very little cost