9 ms·

The $4 Million Complaint Call

474 points by mirceagoia 14y ago

sparknlaunch 14y ago
Nice story however you would only commit to this level of customer service if you had the time, patience and suitable customer base. I don't think many would be spending hours with a customer for a low value product or where little value can be derived. This situation paid off, however you never know if the directors or companies may have discovered the business through other means. I know this all sounds cynical but it's a careful balance of sensibility.
mirceagoia 14y ago
How many companies, even small ones, have that kind of support?
- soupboy 14y ago
  I've had a pretty good experience with Dropbox and Amazon. And more recently with Dell (surprise!)
  - epoxyhockey 14y ago
    Twitter treated me very well with a PEBKAC issue.
    - mirceagoia 14y ago
      Believe it or not, Godaddy has a good customer service as well.
      - damoncali 14y ago
        This shocked me, but I found it to be true not long ago. Who knew.
      - Karunamon 14y ago
        Have to second this. I've never really had any issues with GD's CS. Fast and responsive. Too bad their policies are so horrid :(
      - blu3jack 14y ago
        I do not believe it. I could relate dozens (well more than one dozen) instances of absolutely unforgivably bad godaddy customer service. Their staff are ignorant, their process is incoherent, their documentation is incorrect or misleading, the tools their customer service staff use are broken. I will shoot myself through the hand before I give GoDaddy a nickel. In fact, I would probably shoot myself through the hand if someone told me I needed to call GoDaddy support. For my own projects, I will happily pay the extra 30-40% to a company that is not disgustingly incompetent.
- Alex3917 14y ago
  CustomInk's customer service is actually too good -- the last time I ordered shirts they redesigned our logo without even asking us first. At first I thought the font wouldn't load so the substituted a different one, but nope, they actually kerned the whole thing by hand and even changed the rounding of the corners on the graphic to match the new font. In the end I had to tell them that no, I actually wanted the original logo that we sent them, but the whole thing was kind of amusing.
- kyenneti 14y ago
  Servint. I wish I could handle my customers the way they do it.
- jasonkester 14y ago
  Small companies can afford to do this much better than big ones, since they're often doing it in house. "White Glove" customer support is one of the few things you can do to beat the big guys when you're first starting out. Joel said it best: Remarkable Customer Service, as in service so good that people actually remark about it. http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
  - pacaro 14y ago
    The first software company I worked for (approx 15 employees) had a system where the devs each spent one day every two weeks on the support desk (we also had a full time support person). We probably scored 1/12 on the Joel test[1], but we definitely knew our customers pain points - the insight I gained from the delta between my understanding of a product and a customer's understanding of the same product has been invaluable. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
- vacri 14y ago
  Small ones are more likely to offer it, since they need to be able to differentiate themselves to survive. The author of the story tells of his early days on a tiny budget - what's the bet that he doesn't take support calls now that the company took off, particularly 2am calls?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- pbiggar 14y ago
  Not to toot our own horn, but we do (https://circleci.com https://circleci.com). We make Continuous Integration for web apps, and occasionally a customer will have a "works on my machine" bug. I've definitely spent a couple of evenings on the phone helping customers out with this, even though it's clearly not our fault. Every page in our app has a "Help" button, our About page has my phone number on it, our error dialog has a button to contact support. We love when people contact us. To be honest, as much as I enjoy talking to customers, this is just good business, for tons of reasons: - people won't pay if it mysteriously doesn't work, no matter whose fault it is - customer development is essential to a startup, and this creates opportunities to talk to customers (when you're done, have a chat, don't just sign off) - when something is wrong with your service, you have a personal connection to people who want you to succeed - so they tell you the problem instead of letting you accidentally lose customers. - customers with whom you have a personal connection become your biggest advocates. It certainly costs money and time to do this, but I don't think I'm going to regret it.
pnathan 14y ago
Some people advocate firing your troublesome customers. This is an example of why you just might not want to do that.
- epoxyhockey 14y ago
  There are 2 types of troublesome customers, ones that need extra help using your product and ones that want you to bleed (i.e. they want free stuff or competitors that want you to lose). I love customers that need extra help because I discover all kinds of things that can be improved with my products and I usually gain insight into a whole demographic that I didn't previously understand.
  - shinratdr 14y ago
    > I love customers that need extra help because I discover all kinds of things that can be improved with my products and I usually gain insight into a whole demographic that I didn't previously understand. This is a great attitude, and unfortunately quite rare in the dev community. It's very difficult to see what is cumbersome about a UI if you have been navigating cumbersome UIs your entire life.
  - shinratdr 14y ago
    > I love customers that need extra help because I discover all kinds of things that can be improved with my products and I usually gain insight into a whole demographic that I didn't previously understand. This is a great attitude, and unfortunately quite rare in the dev community. It's very difficult to see what is cumbersome about a UI if you have been navigating cumbersome UIs your entire life.
  - pnathan 14y ago
    Yeah, some customers are really not going to be happy, ever. Ever. They will leech you for all you're worth. But then there are Bobs.
rohansingh 14y ago
This is effectively gambling with your time. You only have a limited amount of time available each day. The minutes or hours you spend on the phone with a single customer, walking them through things like how to install Windows, are minutes or hours you are not using to build things that could reach all of your customers. You could luck out, and that time you spent with a single customer could end up like this, with a $4 million check. Or that call might go nowhere, and because you've neglected other parts of your business and your other customers to cater to the extensive needs of a few, you may find your entire venture collapsing. There are arguments to be made around where this line should be drawn, but helping each and every customer with all of their problems — even when they are unrelated to your actual product or service — is too far in one direction. EDIT: At the end the article points out that not all calls can be treated this, but that "you never know" which should. But, "some things are really important but there's know way to know which", is not helpful in any useful sense.
- agosnell 14y ago
  True, time is always limited, but there's also something to be said for doing things that can't possibly scale while your company is still small enough for it to be possible.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Interesting take on it, which I disagree with. This isn't "gambling with your time" this is "making good on your customer's commitment". And your note triggered a really interesting visceral reaction in me. You can look at life as a series of choices you make and a scoring system by which you evaluate the quality of those choices. Typically a positive scoring system is used so the higher the score the 'better' the decision. It is often the case that people are judged by their scoring system. Examples of scoring systems might be "how much money did I get out of that decision?" or "How many people are better off based on that decision?" These being centered on the individual describe the 'greedy bastard' archetype and the 'saint' archetype. Most people have a more nuanced system which combines the scores of several systems (is this good for my company? my career? my personal wealth? my celebrity? my family? my community?) which they weight sort of like the ice skating scoring system in the Olympics. The point of the article was that if you're committed to your company and your company's success, then you decide to do what ever it takes to solve your customer's problems. That is because they took a chance on your product and you want them to be ok with their choice. Its an anecdotal story which illustrates a principle, of customer focused execution. When you look at successful companies, you will see that they share this principle. And companies that do not, can be disrupted (like the US car industry in the 70's, the airline industry in the 80's, etc etc). There isn't any gambling involved. Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win. That customer will relate that experience, win, they continue to buy your products, win, and they stick with you if you accidentally screw up somehow, total win.
zem 14y ago
even if it had not led to the $4M account (which was an unpredictable, lottery-ticket sort of occurrence), the author identified an excellent "selfish" reason to take the call and spend time with bob - they explicitly designed their software as easy to use, so the travails of an actual person in the industry, who was using their software for his day-to-day business and having problems with it, would have been incredibly valuable user feedback. this is true even if the specific problems bob was having (windows startup options) had superficially nothing to do with their software - if you take a step back, they were all things he needed to do to get their product up and running properly, and were therefore worth taking a look at to see if things could be made easier for the next customer.
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  Who doesn't design their software to be easy to use? This sort of claim is a catch-all.
  - zem 14y ago
    there's often a power versus ease-of-use tradeoff
JeffBlauser 14y ago
As a support manager, I was ready to tweet "Always Listen to your support manager" until I saw it was $4MM in revenue... This is one of the reasons that is hard to adopt the "80/20, walk the difficult customer" approach; I have seen the right manager turn a bad client into a good one too many times. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Mz 14y ago
I love stories like this. A couple of others that come to mind with a similar theme: A bank was going to turn down an account for some long-haired young man in jeans who wanted his statements forwarded all over the place. Then some young employee told the middle-aged manager he was a wealthy rock star who needed his bank statements available while touring. Some young bank teller with an attitude was being an ass to a guy in coveralls or similar, covered in paint and looking kind of like a day laborer. He finally got mad and said he would move his accounts if he did not get treated properly. She continued with the attitude and told him "Go ahead". He was the owner of a construction company and his accounts were worth millions. (Edit: And, yes, he moved them.)
- excuse-me 14y ago
  And a tip to all the Mercedes dealerships in an oil town like Aberdeen or Houston. If an older guy drives up in a beat-up oil company 4x4, don't tell him he can't take a car out on a test drive because it's raining!
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    In other parts of the country, it's an old farmer who just sold his land and wants to buy a new car for each of his four kids, but has to wait around at the dealership until finally the lowest ranking junior salesman is sent out to deal with him.
- eli 14y ago
  Bah, that's a wimpy version. The story I heard was he bought the branch and fired her.
  - Mz 14y ago
    Well, that's the way I (mis?)remembered it. But have an upvote. :-)
- dalke 14y ago
  The rock star one doesn't make sense. Why didn't the bank look at the account to see that he was rich? My bank, for example, once gave me different treatment when they realized I also had a business account with them. There's also the story I heard attributed to Bob Miner of Oracle (see http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/09/oracle.html http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/09/oracle.html ). In the version I heard, once the bank learned he was now very wealthy, they let him know he now had a personal banker. Also, getting a bookkeeper to handle this sort of thing (including bill payments) is trivial, and scheduling a flurry of different addresses which depend on when the statements are mailed, the efficiency of the postal system, and various tour dates seems very shaky.
biot 14y ago
There's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. I'm a huge advocate of going the extra mile to help out a customer, but I could easily imagine a story where a company wasn't able to focus on its profitable customers because it was so inundated with supporting unqualified users that it didn't have the time and resources to close a $10M sale. "We would have chosen to go with ACME Technologies, but when we had challenges with the installation their staff was so tied up offering Windows tutorials that we could never get the help we needed to do a proper implementation. It's a shame as their product did appear to have the edge."
- vacri 14y ago
  Not to mention that if you're not providing 'free' tech support (as in, free to the company), 2-hour calls at 2am on a Sunday morning gets expensive fast. I used to work for a company that worked in sleep medicine, so we had the wonders of a busy night call schedule. Our CEO boasted of our support record (wilfully ignoring actual data) and would demand to know why we didn't do a 2am drive to a customer having difficulties like he did back when he was operating the business out of his garage. It didn't slow him down much when we pointed out that the lab having problems was literally on the other side of the continent. Support is a bit like healthcare - there is always more demand than there is supply. The trick is how to triage it appropriately.
benjaminwootton 14y ago
IMO providing quality service and tech support is the most cost effective thing you can do to market your business bar none. It's shockingly rare to get good proactive customer service nowadays that by giving it a little attention, you can easily give yourself a competitive advantage of your entire industry.
cocolos 14y ago
I wish at&t would read that.
jwallaceparker 14y ago
Great story. I always appreciate a company that has top rate customer service. Amazon.com is the best example I can think of these days. Comcast is the worst.
losethos 14y ago
10 i = i + 1 20 PRINT i 30 IF i > 100000 THEN i = 0: GOTO 10 40 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 10 50 PRINT "Bible, Line:", i God says... unto all my paths; thou settest a print upon the heels of my feet. 13:28 And he, as a rotten thing, consumeth, as a garment that is moth eaten. 14:1 Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. 14:2 He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. 14:3 And doth thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? 14:4 Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one. 14:5 Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; 14:6 Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. ---- Tell Bob he's in the Bible :-)
juddlyon 14y ago
This makes for a heartwarming magazine article but I don't think it's good advice. If you don't set boundaries with your clients, they will set them for you. Which means calling the CEO at 2 AM on a Saturday. The sentiment of always respecting your clients is a good one, but allowing yourself to get roped in on issues that you shouldn't is a surefire path to burnout and losing money.
- mirceagoia 14y ago
  Depends on what kind of clients do you have. If you have individual clients then yeah, it may be a waste of time sometime. But if you have institutional clients (other companies), like this startup had (broadcast stations), then I think it's worth going the extra mile.
kevinalexbrown 14y ago
While I thoroughly enjoy the heartwarming part, I don't think that's why it's good advice from a business perspective. It's great advice because word of mouth is extremely important for a technical business selling to a small but lucrative market where buyers have alternatives (like hiring decisions). This will have less impact in large consumer sales where advertising matters, or when you have a market cornered. It will work when you apply for a job or hire someone. You're selling to a small market - the few employers you speak with. They have some alternatives, but if someone they know and trust (Bob, in this story) raves about you from first-hand experience, it matters quite a lot. Likewise if someone tells me how awesome it is to work with a particular person or group, I am much more likely to take that job among competitive alternatives. Treat your employees like crap and all you'll get are crap new employees, etc. We don't all run businesses in small lucrative markets. But we do all apply to jobs from time to time, where previously helped or pissed off people will make a huge difference.
- seigenblues 14y ago
  This is dead on. It's a mistake to read this and take away some homey homily about how "every customer is a snowflake!" -- the point is that you should correctly value the passionate customer. Your marketing and outreach and customer service departments should understand the relative values of "bought it, loved it!" and "bought it, so?" Those relative values will vary from product to product/industry to industry The comment below at this time ('survivorship bias') is also correct, but only if it's interpreted as a touching anecdote rather than as crucial customer-behavior information for his market segment. Understanding the dynamics of how your customers make their purchasing decisions seems like a better lesson to take from this. (Not the same for every product, either! E.g., my being passionate about Cheerios does nothing for General Mills, really...)
  - Blunt 14y ago
    ya know, I just don't agree with anyone who posts here and uses the word "customer." Yea, Bob was a customer but he is also a human being. Less we forget this and remember we are working with other people then you don't need to worry about "snowflakes" or whether you're customers are happy or not. Just treat everyone you come in contact with with respect & regardless of how you met (business or otherwise) and this world would just be a much better place.
msluyter 14y ago
Survivorship bias. Meanwhile, at the other companies where CEO was too sleepy to make good decisions because he was up all night helping customers configure Windows... well, we don't hear those stories, because they folded. Edited to add: not to denigrate what he did here. He did a nice thing, and it's laudable to be a good person who helps people, whether or not it's the optimal way to spend your time.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- anon01 14y ago
  We have made our first two customers extremely happy with our late hours and endless customer support. We also spent so much time customizing our product for them, we've had to invest 6 man months(so far) trying to get back to a stable product, on one codebase, that works for them AND new customers without direct engineer involvement in each turn up... it has been a mess.
- rprasad 14y ago
  Time spent on this sort of stuff early in the lifecyle of a product can be invaluable to fixing/iterating the product for countless future customers. Think of it as beta testing or customer-focused design that you are getting paid to do.
- Udo 14y ago
  I wish I could vote this up ten times! Another scenario is the company getting successfully sued by Bob for damages because his Windows crashed. Most of the time, the "best" possible outcome with these customers is you'll be held responsible for all their IT problems as an unpaid technician, and the worst would be they'll use patience with their entire computing setup and take it all out on you. The odds of Bob-type users damaging or even destroying a small company are vastly greater than anything else that could happen.
larrys 14y ago
Stories like this (as well as the HN comments below which basically agree with my way of thinking) make good interview topics. Best way to find out how someone thinks is to tell them a story and see how they respond. Not ask them a question because then the answer is to obvious. Whether it be a person you are on a date with or a job interview. While some people are sharp enough to see around the corners and figure out the end game not everybody is.
sethbannon 14y ago
Incredible story. Treat your customers like they're everything, because at the end of the day they are.
kristianp 14y ago
That's not a complaint call, it's a support call. I used to enjoy this type of article, now the thought process is about the likelihood of it happening to your company.
iuguy 14y ago
> There's a moral to the story: Every customer needs to be treated with respect, and no customer should be left dissatisfied. I'm not saying that every customer call is crucially important. But some of them certainly are–and you never know which one might be your "Bob." I'm sorry to correct this, I really am. To provide apple as an example of how the 'bob' issue scales. It isn't about treating customers with respect, it's about treating the customer better than the competitor. Your competitor may respect the customer, as does you. How do you differentiate? If you're aiming for higher cost you need to go better quality of service. I was in a meeting the other day and I spoke candidly to the customer about differences between our penetration test reports and most others. At the end of the day it boils down to relationships and the investment in them. The customer might not be aware they're paying for that, but that's a factor in every business. For us, that means we invest more in relationships and doing things our customers want than publishing research at conferences on the vulnerability du jour. Does it make us less known? Yes. Does it make us less loved? No. I find it hard to believe that there are many companies that have used us and thought, "There was an average company", and that's why bob thought the guys in TFA were so good. It wasn't that they were actually good, it was that they exceeded expectations, which is the goal we should all aim for.
dsirijus 14y ago
Only slightly flammable honest question: If it was so lucrative to take calls at 2AM, why don't they offer that kind of service after anymore? http://support.bsiusa.com/ http://support.bsiusa.com/ :{-
- dalke 14y ago
  My guess is that they've improved their training support, like with the "remote control software" option under Platinum Tech Care Plan. Early on it's cheaper to provide phone support to a small number of customers then it is to set up a comprehensive training program.
wccrawford 14y ago
It all depends on the customer. Bob was apparently a nice guy who just needed a lot of help. I'd have helped him. Had Bob been a jerk and constantly harassed the support staff with problems that were of his own making, then I'd have gotten rid of him. Probably. There could be circumstances. Anecdote time: I worked at an SaaS company. 1 customer was constantly flooding our system via an automated system he had written. It caused quite a lot of downtime and breakage. And he was a jerk. My bosses hated him. He was nothing but a pain in their necks. I loved him. He constantly stressed out our system and showed me the bottlenecks. I used it to fix all kinds of problems years before they became a problem for other customers. Any time he caused a problem, we'd lock his account, fix it, and then unlock him again. Sometimes days later. Eventually, he caused enough problems that they dumped him. Fast forward years later, and now our regular customers were using the system as hard as he was. Many of them. Now, if the system broke, we had no spare capacity. Everything was harder to fix. I will probably never forget his name and the lesson I learned about how useful a 'bad' customer can be.
- gautamsomani 14y ago
  This is interesting, I mean a user (aka customer) of a system pointing out the bottlenecks (or loopholes) of your system. I'll remember this incident of yours. :)
alanh 14y ago
On that note — avoid Yellow Cab. They don’t give a hoot about either customers nor cab drivers.
damian2000 14y ago
That is just an awesome story. Goes to show that one of the most important things a new business should provide is unbelievably good customer service.
ctdonath 14y ago
Reminds me of a support call with Ruth in Idaho years ago. It didn't result in $4M, but it wasn't small potatoes either. Like Bob, she was new to computers. I spent 10 hours over 2 days walking her thru the basics of using a computer so she could use our insurance company software. She was very thankful. So thankful she sent me a box containing ... two giant Idaho potatoes, nearly a foot long each. I said it wasn't small potatoes.
- StacyC 14y ago
  I love this story and I don’t care if it’s true.
  - ctdonath 14y ago
    :-) It is true. One potato was enough to supply all the mashed tubers for the extended-family Thanksgiving dinner. Bonus: we happened to grow a ginormous beet of comparable size, used at the same huge meal.
rexreed 14y ago
The only thing worse than a customer that constantly calls and requires attention is one that doesn't call at all and finds your product or service useless. If the customer is bothered enough to spend his/her valuable time on your product, that means you have some value. I would much prefer this over a customer who doesn't trouble themselves to spend any time at all on my product and then mysteriously cancels later. Yes, customer support has a cost. So does marketing and getting customer feedback as part of an MVP process. While I cringe when customers are demanding, I also realize how valuable it can be. But I make sure they pay their bills as well. And if I have a support contract, I make sure they buy it -- even if they squeeze the value of that to the last drop.
huhtenberg 14y ago
For every Bob there is a metric ton of idiots that feel entitled to support and won't give much thought to you answering their calls in 2AM on Sunday morning. Being extra nice to customers doesn't preclude to using some common sense.
ereckers 14y ago
This was a nice story and at the end I couldn't wait to get to the comments to hear that this was wrong and customers are in fact sh!t. I wasn't disappointed. Coming from having some customer issues of my own recently it was nice to read a genuine feel good story. Even if it just a fairy tale.
tersiag 14y ago
This is a really great story
patio11 14y ago
I paid for college working as an Order Entry operator for a division large office supplies store (you know, the kind of place where you go when you want to buy paper and... staples). We got a memo from the CEO every couple of months. I can quote the most memorable one in it's entirety: [Grainy photograph of photocopied email with effusive praise from the Purchasing Director at a Midwestern life insurance company, which had just opened a $300,000 a year account with us, about his purchasing experience with $COMPANY.] Bob is talking about the $22.69 order he made of balloons for his daughter's birthday. Treat every order like Cindy treated that one. Keep up the good work. -- CEO
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  Isn't it likely that is the only order that CEO ever made personally? And he happened to catch Cindy on good day? My only takeaway from this is if you want orders to be taken from CEOs by pleasent happy people, hire pleasant, happy people to work for you. Is that what you meant?
  - patio11 14y ago
    Sorry, wasn't clear, let me elaborate: prior to the Director of Purchasing at $CUSTOMER deciding to award $COMPANY a $300,000 a year account, Bob Smith (who happens to be DoP at $CUSTOMER when not doting on his daughter) was in a bind with regards to shipping time frames on birthday balloons, and Cindy (a lovely lady who makes $10.50 an hour and whose good days were best described as "the ones ending in Y") overrode the computer's heuristics for shipping methods, shipped $25 of balloons in a $50 envelope, and called the warehouse personally to make sure it ended up on the very last van for delivery in time for the birthday the following day. Working in seasonal order entry is a very cruddy job, by the way, but I'll give it to $COMPANY: they genuinely believed and practiced all the words that everyone repeats about customer satisfaction.
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
      Thank you. Now the world would be a fairer place if 10.50 an hour could be supplemented with x% of 300,000
DaveChild 14y ago
Well, don't bother visiting that on a mobile. The entire page loads, and then you get redirected to a mobile version ... which is broken. Pathetic.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Same here; maxthon on android.
cheatercheater 14y ago
TLDR: Yet another story about how someone lucked out, and therefore you should follow their flawed approach, because they think the chance to luck out like they did is 100%, whereas in fact it is 0.00001%. The blog poster's dream world: we have randomly lucked out by having a single annoying customer who we stuck with against better judgement, and the frog turned out to be the prince six months after we cupped its balls on a Sunday at 2 am. In reality: if you spend your time indulging annoying customers there's a 99.9999999% chance they'll just keep being annoying customers. You will piss off everyone at your company for indulging in the annoying customers' ridiculous requests, and if you're on my support team I will fire you, because you have better things to do, such as supporting people that respect the privacy of people they do not know. If Bob called me at 2 am, there's a non-zero probability the outcome would be him having a lot of bad words to spread about me. You know what? It's probably worth it, because I don't want good word of mouth spread by people clueless enough to call me at 2 in the morning. My experience here? In over a decade of working freelance, therefore needing a new job every several weeks, I've never had bad word of mouth stop me from getting a job. And I have had to shut down a lot of Bobs, quite often in a fiery fireball of very, very satisfying fury. In retrospect, most Bobs have never amounted to much at all, and I often wonder why I hadn't cut them off much earlier. Think Bob would have stood up in that meeting, and said, "oh yeah, totally go with those guys you plan to, because that one company you're not thinking of using wouldn't speak to me at 2 am"?
scott_meade 14y ago
Hope I'm not a customer of the commentators declaring they don't have time or resources to help all customers who ask. If you don't, you're not holding up your end of the bargain.
maxxpower 14y ago
I love that story, thanks for sharing
jcdrepair 14y ago
What I find most interesting here is not the customer service story. That's interesting and inspiring, but what really amazes me is that Bob didn't know how to use a computer, he spent a couple hours on the phone, and then never had to call back again. If that's true, you know what it tells me? This was incredibly well designed software. The reason Ron got $4 million dollars wasn't because he spent time on the phone with Bob. It's because he had great software that worked and that a complete novice, with a little help, could configure and run. What large company wouldn't want software like that? Yes, customer service is important, but having a great product that's easy to use is the really big lesson here.

474 points by mirceagoia 14y ago

Nice story however you would only commit to this level of customer service if you had the time, patience and suitable customer base. I don't think many would be spending hours with a customer for a low value product or where little value can be derived. This situation paid off, however you never know if the directors or companies may have discovered the business through other means. I know this all sounds cynical but it's a careful balance of sensibility.

mirceagoia 14y ago

How many companies, even small ones, have that kind of support?

soupboy 14y ago
I've had a pretty good experience with Dropbox and Amazon. And more recently with Dell (surprise!)
- epoxyhockey 14y ago
  Twitter treated me very well with a PEBKAC issue.
  - mirceagoia 14y ago
    Believe it or not, Godaddy has a good customer service as well.
    - damoncali 14y ago
      This shocked me, but I found it to be true not long ago. Who knew.
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      Have to second this. I've never really had any issues with GD's CS. Fast and responsive. Too bad their policies are so horrid :(
    - blu3jack 14y ago
      I do not believe it. I could relate dozens (well more than one dozen) instances of absolutely unforgivably bad godaddy customer service. Their staff are ignorant, their process is incoherent, their documentation is incorrect or misleading, the tools their customer service staff use are broken. I will shoot myself through the hand before I give GoDaddy a nickel. In fact, I would probably shoot myself through the hand if someone told me I needed to call GoDaddy support. For my own projects, I will happily pay the extra 30-40% to a company that is not disgustingly incompetent.
Alex3917 14y ago
CustomInk's customer service is actually too good -- the last time I ordered shirts they redesigned our logo without even asking us first. At first I thought the font wouldn't load so the substituted a different one, but nope, they actually kerned the whole thing by hand and even changed the rounding of the corners on the graphic to match the new font. In the end I had to tell them that no, I actually wanted the original logo that we sent them, but the whole thing was kind of amusing.
kyenneti 14y ago
Servint. I wish I could handle my customers the way they do it.
jasonkester 14y ago
Small companies can afford to do this much better than big ones, since they're often doing it in house. "White Glove" customer support is one of the few things you can do to beat the big guys when you're first starting out. Joel said it best: Remarkable Customer Service, as in service so good that people actually remark about it. http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
- pacaro 14y ago
  The first software company I worked for (approx 15 employees) had a system where the devs each spent one day every two weeks on the support desk (we also had a full time support person). We probably scored 1/12 on the Joel test[1], but we definitely knew our customers pain points - the insight I gained from the delta between my understanding of a product and a customer's understanding of the same product has been invaluable. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
vacri 14y ago
Small ones are more likely to offer it, since they need to be able to differentiate themselves to survive. The author of the story tells of his early days on a tiny budget - what's the bet that he doesn't take support calls now that the company took off, particularly 2am calls?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
pbiggar 14y ago
Not to toot our own horn, but we do (https://circleci.com https://circleci.com). We make Continuous Integration for web apps, and occasionally a customer will have a "works on my machine" bug. I've definitely spent a couple of evenings on the phone helping customers out with this, even though it's clearly not our fault. Every page in our app has a "Help" button, our About page has my phone number on it, our error dialog has a button to contact support. We love when people contact us. To be honest, as much as I enjoy talking to customers, this is just good business, for tons of reasons: - people won't pay if it mysteriously doesn't work, no matter whose fault it is - customer development is essential to a startup, and this creates opportunities to talk to customers (when you're done, have a chat, don't just sign off) - when something is wrong with your service, you have a personal connection to people who want you to succeed - so they tell you the problem instead of letting you accidentally lose customers. - customers with whom you have a personal connection become your biggest advocates. It certainly costs money and time to do this, but I don't think I'm going to regret it.

pnathan 14y ago

Some people advocate firing your troublesome customers. This is an example of why you just might not want to do that.

epoxyhockey 14y ago
There are 2 types of troublesome customers, ones that need extra help using your product and ones that want you to bleed (i.e. they want free stuff or competitors that want you to lose). I love customers that need extra help because I discover all kinds of things that can be improved with my products and I usually gain insight into a whole demographic that I didn't previously understand.
- shinratdr 14y ago
  > I love customers that need extra help because I discover all kinds of things that can be improved with my products and I usually gain insight into a whole demographic that I didn't previously understand. This is a great attitude, and unfortunately quite rare in the dev community. It's very difficult to see what is cumbersome about a UI if you have been navigating cumbersome UIs your entire life.
- shinratdr 14y ago
  > I love customers that need extra help because I discover all kinds of things that can be improved with my products and I usually gain insight into a whole demographic that I didn't previously understand. This is a great attitude, and unfortunately quite rare in the dev community. It's very difficult to see what is cumbersome about a UI if you have been navigating cumbersome UIs your entire life.
- pnathan 14y ago
  Yeah, some customers are really not going to be happy, ever. Ever. They will leech you for all you're worth. But then there are Bobs.

rohansingh 14y ago

This is effectively gambling with your time. You only have a limited amount of time available each day. The minutes or hours you spend on the phone with a single customer, walking them through things like how to install Windows, are minutes or hours you are not using to build things that could reach all of your customers. You could luck out, and that time you spent with a single customer could end up like this, with a $4 million check. Or that call might go nowhere, and because you've neglected other parts of your business and your other customers to cater to the extensive needs of a few, you may find your entire venture collapsing. There are arguments to be made around where this line should be drawn, but helping each and every customer with all of their problems — even when they are unrelated to your actual product or service — is too far in one direction. EDIT: At the end the article points out that not all calls can be treated this, but that "you never know" which should. But, "some things are really important but there's know way to know which", is not helpful in any useful sense.

agosnell 14y ago
True, time is always limited, but there's also something to be said for doing things that can't possibly scale while your company is still small enough for it to be possible.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Interesting take on it, which I disagree with. This isn't "gambling with your time" this is "making good on your customer's commitment". And your note triggered a really interesting visceral reaction in me. You can look at life as a series of choices you make and a scoring system by which you evaluate the quality of those choices. Typically a positive scoring system is used so the higher the score the 'better' the decision. It is often the case that people are judged by their scoring system. Examples of scoring systems might be "how much money did I get out of that decision?" or "How many people are better off based on that decision?" These being centered on the individual describe the 'greedy bastard' archetype and the 'saint' archetype. Most people have a more nuanced system which combines the scores of several systems (is this good for my company? my career? my personal wealth? my celebrity? my family? my community?) which they weight sort of like the ice skating scoring system in the Olympics. The point of the article was that if you're committed to your company and your company's success, then you decide to do what ever it takes to solve your customer's problems. That is because they took a chance on your product and you want them to be ok with their choice. Its an anecdotal story which illustrates a principle, of customer focused execution. When you look at successful companies, you will see that they share this principle. And companies that do not, can be disrupted (like the US car industry in the 70's, the airline industry in the 80's, etc etc). There isn't any gambling involved. Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win. That customer will relate that experience, win, they continue to buy your products, win, and they stick with you if you accidentally screw up somehow, total win.

zem 14y ago

even if it had not led to the $4M account (which was an unpredictable, lottery-ticket sort of occurrence), the author identified an excellent "selfish" reason to take the call and spend time with bob - they explicitly designed their software as easy to use, so the travails of an actual person in the industry, who was using their software for his day-to-day business and having problems with it, would have been incredibly valuable user feedback. this is true even if the specific problems bob was having (windows startup options) had superficially nothing to do with their software - if you take a step back, they were all things he needed to do to get their product up and running properly, and were therefore worth taking a look at to see if things could be made easier for the next customer.

cheatercheater 14y ago
Who doesn't design their software to be easy to use? This sort of claim is a catch-all.
- zem 14y ago
  there's often a power versus ease-of-use tradeoff

JeffBlauser 14y ago

As a support manager, I was ready to tweet "Always Listen to your support manager" until I saw it was $4MM in revenue... This is one of the reasons that is hard to adopt the "80/20, walk the difficult customer" approach; I have seen the right manager turn a bad client into a good one too many times. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Mz 14y ago

I love stories like this. A couple of others that come to mind with a similar theme: A bank was going to turn down an account for some long-haired young man in jeans who wanted his statements forwarded all over the place. Then some young employee told the middle-aged manager he was a wealthy rock star who needed his bank statements available while touring. Some young bank teller with an attitude was being an ass to a guy in coveralls or similar, covered in paint and looking kind of like a day laborer. He finally got mad and said he would move his accounts if he did not get treated properly. She continued with the attitude and told him "Go ahead". He was the owner of a construction company and his accounts were worth millions. (Edit: And, yes, he moved them.)

excuse-me 14y ago
And a tip to all the Mercedes dealerships in an oil town like Aberdeen or Houston. If an older guy drives up in a beat-up oil company 4x4, don't tell him he can't take a car out on a test drive because it's raining!
- tedunangst 14y ago
  In other parts of the country, it's an old farmer who just sold his land and wants to buy a new car for each of his four kids, but has to wait around at the dealership until finally the lowest ranking junior salesman is sent out to deal with him.
eli 14y ago
Bah, that's a wimpy version. The story I heard was he bought the branch and fired her.
- Mz 14y ago
  Well, that's the way I (mis?)remembered it. But have an upvote. :-)
dalke 14y ago
The rock star one doesn't make sense. Why didn't the bank look at the account to see that he was rich? My bank, for example, once gave me different treatment when they realized I also had a business account with them. There's also the story I heard attributed to Bob Miner of Oracle (see http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/09/oracle.html http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/09/oracle.html ). In the version I heard, once the bank learned he was now very wealthy, they let him know he now had a personal banker. Also, getting a bookkeeper to handle this sort of thing (including bill payments) is trivial, and scheduling a flurry of different addresses which depend on when the statements are mailed, the efficiency of the postal system, and various tour dates seems very shaky.

biot 14y ago

There's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. I'm a huge advocate of going the extra mile to help out a customer, but I could easily imagine a story where a company wasn't able to focus on its profitable customers because it was so inundated with supporting unqualified users that it didn't have the time and resources to close a $10M sale. "We would have chosen to go with ACME Technologies, but when we had challenges with the installation their staff was so tied up offering Windows tutorials that we could never get the help we needed to do a proper implementation. It's a shame as their product did appear to have the edge."

vacri 14y ago
Not to mention that if you're not providing 'free' tech support (as in, free to the company), 2-hour calls at 2am on a Sunday morning gets expensive fast. I used to work for a company that worked in sleep medicine, so we had the wonders of a busy night call schedule. Our CEO boasted of our support record (wilfully ignoring actual data) and would demand to know why we didn't do a 2am drive to a customer having difficulties like he did back when he was operating the business out of his garage. It didn't slow him down much when we pointed out that the lab having problems was literally on the other side of the continent. Support is a bit like healthcare - there is always more demand than there is supply. The trick is how to triage it appropriately.

benjaminwootton 14y ago

IMO providing quality service and tech support is the most cost effective thing you can do to market your business bar none. It's shockingly rare to get good proactive customer service nowadays that by giving it a little attention, you can easily give yourself a competitive advantage of your entire industry.

cocolos 14y ago

I wish at&t would read that.

jwallaceparker 14y ago

Great story. I always appreciate a company that has top rate customer service. Amazon.com is the best example I can think of these days. Comcast is the worst.

losethos 14y ago

10 i = i + 1 20 PRINT i 30 IF i > 100000 THEN i = 0: GOTO 10 40 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 10 50 PRINT "Bible, Line:", i God says... unto all my paths; thou settest a print upon the heels of my feet. 13:28 And he, as a rotten thing, consumeth, as a garment that is moth eaten. 14:1 Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. 14:2 He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. 14:3 And doth thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? 14:4 Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one. 14:5 Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; 14:6 Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. ---- Tell Bob he's in the Bible :-)

juddlyon 14y ago

This makes for a heartwarming magazine article but I don't think it's good advice. If you don't set boundaries with your clients, they will set them for you. Which means calling the CEO at 2 AM on a Saturday. The sentiment of always respecting your clients is a good one, but allowing yourself to get roped in on issues that you shouldn't is a surefire path to burnout and losing money.

mirceagoia 14y ago
Depends on what kind of clients do you have. If you have individual clients then yeah, it may be a waste of time sometime. But if you have institutional clients (other companies), like this startup had (broadcast stations), then I think it's worth going the extra mile.

kevinalexbrown 14y ago

While I thoroughly enjoy the heartwarming part, I don't think that's why it's good advice from a business perspective. It's great advice because word of mouth is extremely important for a technical business selling to a small but lucrative market where buyers have alternatives (like hiring decisions). This will have less impact in large consumer sales where advertising matters, or when you have a market cornered. It will work when you apply for a job or hire someone. You're selling to a small market - the few employers you speak with. They have some alternatives, but if someone they know and trust (Bob, in this story) raves about you from first-hand experience, it matters quite a lot. Likewise if someone tells me how awesome it is to work with a particular person or group, I am much more likely to take that job among competitive alternatives. Treat your employees like crap and all you'll get are crap new employees, etc. We don't all run businesses in small lucrative markets. But we do all apply to jobs from time to time, where previously helped or pissed off people will make a huge difference.

seigenblues 14y ago
This is dead on. It's a mistake to read this and take away some homey homily about how "every customer is a snowflake!" -- the point is that you should correctly value the passionate customer. Your marketing and outreach and customer service departments should understand the relative values of "bought it, loved it!" and "bought it, so?" Those relative values will vary from product to product/industry to industry The comment below at this time ('survivorship bias') is also correct, but only if it's interpreted as a touching anecdote rather than as crucial customer-behavior information for his market segment. Understanding the dynamics of how your customers make their purchasing decisions seems like a better lesson to take from this. (Not the same for every product, either! E.g., my being passionate about Cheerios does nothing for General Mills, really...)
- Blunt 14y ago
  ya know, I just don't agree with anyone who posts here and uses the word "customer." Yea, Bob was a customer but he is also a human being. Less we forget this and remember we are working with other people then you don't need to worry about "snowflakes" or whether you're customers are happy or not. Just treat everyone you come in contact with with respect & regardless of how you met (business or otherwise) and this world would just be a much better place.

msluyter 14y ago

Survivorship bias. Meanwhile, at the other companies where CEO was too sleepy to make good decisions because he was up all night helping customers configure Windows... well, we don't hear those stories, because they folded. Edited to add: not to denigrate what he did here. He did a nice thing, and it's laudable to be a good person who helps people, whether or not it's the optimal way to spend your time.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
anon01 14y ago
We have made our first two customers extremely happy with our late hours and endless customer support. We also spent so much time customizing our product for them, we've had to invest 6 man months(so far) trying to get back to a stable product, on one codebase, that works for them AND new customers without direct engineer involvement in each turn up... it has been a mess.
rprasad 14y ago
Time spent on this sort of stuff early in the lifecyle of a product can be invaluable to fixing/iterating the product for countless future customers. Think of it as beta testing or customer-focused design that you are getting paid to do.
Udo 14y ago
I wish I could vote this up ten times! Another scenario is the company getting successfully sued by Bob for damages because his Windows crashed. Most of the time, the "best" possible outcome with these customers is you'll be held responsible for all their IT problems as an unpaid technician, and the worst would be they'll use patience with their entire computing setup and take it all out on you. The odds of Bob-type users damaging or even destroying a small company are vastly greater than anything else that could happen.

larrys 14y ago

Stories like this (as well as the HN comments below which basically agree with my way of thinking) make good interview topics. Best way to find out how someone thinks is to tell them a story and see how they respond. Not ask them a question because then the answer is to obvious. Whether it be a person you are on a date with or a job interview. While some people are sharp enough to see around the corners and figure out the end game not everybody is.

sethbannon 14y ago

Incredible story. Treat your customers like they're everything, because at the end of the day they are.

kristianp 14y ago

That's not a complaint call, it's a support call. I used to enjoy this type of article, now the thought process is about the likelihood of it happening to your company.

iuguy 14y ago

> There's a moral to the story: Every customer needs to be treated with respect, and no customer should be left dissatisfied. I'm not saying that every customer call is crucially important. But some of them certainly are–and you never know which one might be your "Bob." I'm sorry to correct this, I really am. To provide apple as an example of how the 'bob' issue scales. It isn't about treating customers with respect, it's about treating the customer better than the competitor. Your competitor may respect the customer, as does you. How do you differentiate? If you're aiming for higher cost you need to go better quality of service. I was in a meeting the other day and I spoke candidly to the customer about differences between our penetration test reports and most others. At the end of the day it boils down to relationships and the investment in them. The customer might not be aware they're paying for that, but that's a factor in every business. For us, that means we invest more in relationships and doing things our customers want than publishing research at conferences on the vulnerability du jour. Does it make us less known? Yes. Does it make us less loved? No. I find it hard to believe that there are many companies that have used us and thought, "There was an average company", and that's why bob thought the guys in TFA were so good. It wasn't that they were actually good, it was that they exceeded expectations, which is the goal we should all aim for.

dsirijus 14y ago

Only slightly flammable honest question: If it was so lucrative to take calls at 2AM, why don't they offer that kind of service after anymore? http://support.bsiusa.com/ http://support.bsiusa.com/ :{-

dalke 14y ago
My guess is that they've improved their training support, like with the "remote control software" option under Platinum Tech Care Plan. Early on it's cheaper to provide phone support to a small number of customers then it is to set up a comprehensive training program.

wccrawford 14y ago

It all depends on the customer. Bob was apparently a nice guy who just needed a lot of help. I'd have helped him. Had Bob been a jerk and constantly harassed the support staff with problems that were of his own making, then I'd have gotten rid of him. Probably. There could be circumstances. Anecdote time: I worked at an SaaS company. 1 customer was constantly flooding our system via an automated system he had written. It caused quite a lot of downtime and breakage. And he was a jerk. My bosses hated him. He was nothing but a pain in their necks. I loved him. He constantly stressed out our system and showed me the bottlenecks. I used it to fix all kinds of problems years before they became a problem for other customers. Any time he caused a problem, we'd lock his account, fix it, and then unlock him again. Sometimes days later. Eventually, he caused enough problems that they dumped him. Fast forward years later, and now our regular customers were using the system as hard as he was. Many of them. Now, if the system broke, we had no spare capacity. Everything was harder to fix. I will probably never forget his name and the lesson I learned about how useful a 'bad' customer can be.

gautamsomani 14y ago
This is interesting, I mean a user (aka customer) of a system pointing out the bottlenecks (or loopholes) of your system. I'll remember this incident of yours. :)

alanh 14y ago

On that note — avoid Yellow Cab. They don’t give a hoot about either customers nor cab drivers.

damian2000 14y ago

That is just an awesome story. Goes to show that one of the most important things a new business should provide is unbelievably good customer service.

ctdonath 14y ago

Reminds me of a support call with Ruth in Idaho years ago. It didn't result in $4M, but it wasn't small potatoes either. Like Bob, she was new to computers. I spent 10 hours over 2 days walking her thru the basics of using a computer so she could use our insurance company software. She was very thankful. So thankful she sent me a box containing ... two giant Idaho potatoes, nearly a foot long each. I said it wasn't small potatoes.

StacyC 14y ago
I love this story and I don’t care if it’s true.
- ctdonath 14y ago
  :-) It is true. One potato was enough to supply all the mashed tubers for the extended-family Thanksgiving dinner. Bonus: we happened to grow a ginormous beet of comparable size, used at the same huge meal.

rexreed 14y ago

The only thing worse than a customer that constantly calls and requires attention is one that doesn't call at all and finds your product or service useless. If the customer is bothered enough to spend his/her valuable time on your product, that means you have some value. I would much prefer this over a customer who doesn't trouble themselves to spend any time at all on my product and then mysteriously cancels later. Yes, customer support has a cost. So does marketing and getting customer feedback as part of an MVP process. While I cringe when customers are demanding, I also realize how valuable it can be. But I make sure they pay their bills as well. And if I have a support contract, I make sure they buy it -- even if they squeeze the value of that to the last drop.

huhtenberg 14y ago

For every Bob there is a metric ton of idiots that feel entitled to support and won't give much thought to you answering their calls in 2AM on Sunday morning. Being extra nice to customers doesn't preclude to using some common sense.

ereckers 14y ago

This was a nice story and at the end I couldn't wait to get to the comments to hear that this was wrong and customers are in fact sh!t. I wasn't disappointed. Coming from having some customer issues of my own recently it was nice to read a genuine feel good story. Even if it just a fairy tale.

tersiag 14y ago

This is a really great story

patio11 14y ago

I paid for college working as an Order Entry operator for a division large office supplies store (you know, the kind of place where you go when you want to buy paper and... staples). We got a memo from the CEO every couple of months. I can quote the most memorable one in it's entirety: [Grainy photograph of photocopied email with effusive praise from the Purchasing Director at a Midwestern life insurance company, which had just opened a $300,000 a year account with us, about his purchasing experience with $COMPANY.] Bob is talking about the $22.69 order he made of balloons for his daughter's birthday. Treat every order like Cindy treated that one. Keep up the good work. -- CEO

lifeisstillgood 14y ago
Isn't it likely that is the only order that CEO ever made personally? And he happened to catch Cindy on good day? My only takeaway from this is if you want orders to be taken from CEOs by pleasent happy people, hire pleasant, happy people to work for you. Is that what you meant?
- patio11 14y ago
  Sorry, wasn't clear, let me elaborate: prior to the Director of Purchasing at $CUSTOMER deciding to award $COMPANY a $300,000 a year account, Bob Smith (who happens to be DoP at $CUSTOMER when not doting on his daughter) was in a bind with regards to shipping time frames on birthday balloons, and Cindy (a lovely lady who makes $10.50 an hour and whose good days were best described as "the ones ending in Y") overrode the computer's heuristics for shipping methods, shipped $25 of balloons in a $50 envelope, and called the warehouse personally to make sure it ended up on the very last van for delivery in time for the birthday the following day. Working in seasonal order entry is a very cruddy job, by the way, but I'll give it to $COMPANY: they genuinely believed and practiced all the words that everyone repeats about customer satisfaction.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Thank you. Now the world would be a fairer place if 10.50 an hour could be supplemented with x% of 300,000

DaveChild 14y ago

Well, don't bother visiting that on a mobile. The entire page loads, and then you get redirected to a mobile version ... which is broken. Pathetic.

pbhjpbhj 14y ago
Same here; maxthon on android.

cheatercheater 14y ago

TLDR: Yet another story about how someone lucked out, and therefore you should follow their flawed approach, because they think the chance to luck out like they did is 100%, whereas in fact it is 0.00001%. The blog poster's dream world: we have randomly lucked out by having a single annoying customer who we stuck with against better judgement, and the frog turned out to be the prince six months after we cupped its balls on a Sunday at 2 am. In reality: if you spend your time indulging annoying customers there's a 99.9999999% chance they'll just keep being annoying customers. You will piss off everyone at your company for indulging in the annoying customers' ridiculous requests, and if you're on my support team I will fire you, because you have better things to do, such as supporting people that respect the privacy of people they do not know. If Bob called me at 2 am, there's a non-zero probability the outcome would be him having a lot of bad words to spread about me. You know what? It's probably worth it, because I don't want good word of mouth spread by people clueless enough to call me at 2 in the morning. My experience here? In over a decade of working freelance, therefore needing a new job every several weeks, I've never had bad word of mouth stop me from getting a job. And I have had to shut down a lot of Bobs, quite often in a fiery fireball of very, very satisfying fury. In retrospect, most Bobs have never amounted to much at all, and I often wonder why I hadn't cut them off much earlier. Think Bob would have stood up in that meeting, and said, "oh yeah, totally go with those guys you plan to, because that one company you're not thinking of using wouldn't speak to me at 2 am"?

scott_meade 14y ago

Hope I'm not a customer of the commentators declaring they don't have time or resources to help all customers who ask. If you don't, you're not holding up your end of the bargain.

maxxpower 14y ago

I love that story, thanks for sharing

jcdrepair 14y ago

What I find most interesting here is not the customer service story. That's interesting and inspiring, but what really amazes me is that Bob didn't know how to use a computer, he spent a couple hours on the phone, and then never had to call back again. If that's true, you know what it tells me? This was incredibly well designed software. The reason Ron got $4 million dollars wasn't because he spent time on the phone with Bob. It's because he had great software that worked and that a complete novice, with a little help, could configure and run. What large company wouldn't want software like that? Yes, customer service is important, but having a great product that's easy to use is the really big lesson here.