I've spent most of my career in e-commerce and I've dealt with these people for years. Your best recourse is to get rid of them, quickly. Seriously. Why all

I've spent most of my career in e-commerce and I've dealt with these people for years. Your best recourse is to get rid of them, quickly. Seriously. Why allow them to drain your resources when they could be draining your competitor's instead? Back in the day, I worked for a large e-commerce company. We started a project to track customer value. Simplified, customer value = total_purchases - (total_returns * return_processing_cost_factor) . We had customers who had made dozens of purchases but had negative value to us because they returned almost everything they ordered. We wanted to keep free, no-hassle returns but these people were abusing us. The only solution? Get rid of them as quickly as possible. We discussed--half seriously--giving them gift certificates to competitors and even closing their accounts. There are plenty of less-harsh methods, too. We talked about identifying their Caller ID when they called customer service to make a return and intentionally putting them on hold for a little bit longer. Since you aren't really an e-commerce company, your solution will be different. Figure out a metric for customer value and act on that metric. Whether it's discontinuing service, or moving them to slower servers, or de-prioritizing their customer service inquiries, look for ways to gently encourage them to go elsewhere. You can't feel too badly about this. There are some real leeches out there, happy to bleed you dry and maximize their benefits while minimizing your profits. These people ruin good things for everyone else.