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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 singl

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.
- jmspring 14y ago
  Well said. There may be companies/products/sites (say Facebook) where responding to every customer gripe is not feasibly addressable (or even valid). However, most of the world works in terms of products and services. You want to delight and provide your customers with the help you can (and more often than not, it will pay off). In terms of scale, take Apple while Steve Jobs was active. For every amusing one liner email that made it into the blogs/news, I suspect there was many more that were contacted by executive customer support for assistance. Was it Steve responding to each and every person? No, but he did care about quality and there were multiple situations where a letter about an unusual circumstance resulted in customers getting good service. The market around products like the one in the article are generally tight, most people know each other, etc. In this case, the founder/ceo was able (and committed) to handling the situation. In bigger market opportunities, an organization with a good support staff will likely attract more business over time than one without.
- rohansingh 14y ago
  Let me reply to just one part of this, which I think responds to the main point I was trying to make: > Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win. While this may be true, the fact remains that you have a limited amount of time. As a matter of reality, you simply cannot spend an infinite amount of time with every customer. My original point was that, given that you have this limited amount of time, it is important to intelligently decide how to divide it among multiple customers and priorities — rather than simply spending inordinate amounts of time with single customers because they ask for it.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    "While this may be true, the fact remains that you have a limited amount of time. As a matter of reality, you simply cannot spend an infinite amount of time with every customer." Perfect. This captures in a single sentence the trap you can get yourself into here. Lets start with the obvious, if your product is so impossible to use that you need infinite customer support hours with every customer in order to use it, well you need to pick a different line of work right? But lets start with the assumption that you make a fine product and customers like it. The reality is that every product has to teach the customer how to use it at some level, from the simple picture on your electric toothbrush telling you to plug in the base and put the toothbrush into the base, to a description of effects various tools achieve in Photoshop. You 1) sell the product, 2) customer buys it, 3) learns it, 4) uses it. Its up to your marketing department to get the customer between steps 1 and 2, its up to your support to get them between 3 and 4. Every time you have to help a customer between steps 3 and 4, if you feed that back into the product (design, documentation, execution) you mitigate the future chance of hitting that problem with another customer. Unless your product is infinitely complex (see my first point) then, like a legal contract that has grown to 6 pages because of the clauses that deal with each problem that came before, the amount of time you need to spend with customers goes down. What is more amazing is that new customers benefit from all the work you've put into making the product easy to use and they share that as 'delight' with their peers, who bring in more customers. This is the truth in this anecdote, you have a limited amount of time to succeed and every time you spend that time with a customer, helping to solve their problems with using your product, you gain much more time down the road. And you gain expertise in designing products in the future. If you read that discussion about the difference between 'years of experience' vs 'knowledge' this is it, in a nutshell. You as an entrepreneur become more valuable knowing about problems that customers will have, you as a company become more valuable because people learn to trust you, and your products become more valuable because all of that knowledge gets folded into them. There is no gamble here. There is no 'wasted' time. It is all useful time well spent, assuming you bring back the knowledge and incorporate it into your culture, and your products.
gte910h 14y ago
I've had "basic computer time" with customers before. Usually it doesn't pay off in direct dollars. But some of them I had to push them out the door with a stick they were so loyal by the end of the time they could use our stuff.
danilocampos 14y ago
I would posit that the much bigger gamble is taking a casual view of your obligations to customers. Word of mouth is a potent thing. A company that values chasing new dollars over taking care of existing customers isn't going to enjoy a good reputation. Moreover – customer support issues, properly handled, are a crucial window into your product's performance, reliability and usability. Every interaction you have with a customer impacts your brand. Sometimes you win the lottery. Other times you don't. But I'd much rather err on the side of giving a fuck. Anything less is revolting to me, both as a customer and as someone whose bills are paid by the existence of customers. If you sell something, the customers are your job.

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.

jmspring 14y ago
Well said. There may be companies/products/sites (say Facebook) where responding to every customer gripe is not feasibly addressable (or even valid). However, most of the world works in terms of products and services. You want to delight and provide your customers with the help you can (and more often than not, it will pay off). In terms of scale, take Apple while Steve Jobs was active. For every amusing one liner email that made it into the blogs/news, I suspect there was many more that were contacted by executive customer support for assistance. Was it Steve responding to each and every person? No, but he did care about quality and there were multiple situations where a letter about an unusual circumstance resulted in customers getting good service. The market around products like the one in the article are generally tight, most people know each other, etc. In this case, the founder/ceo was able (and committed) to handling the situation. In bigger market opportunities, an organization with a good support staff will likely attract more business over time than one without.
rohansingh 14y ago
Let me reply to just one part of this, which I think responds to the main point I was trying to make: > Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win. While this may be true, the fact remains that you have a limited amount of time. As a matter of reality, you simply cannot spend an infinite amount of time with every customer. My original point was that, given that you have this limited amount of time, it is important to intelligently decide how to divide it among multiple customers and priorities — rather than simply spending inordinate amounts of time with single customers because they ask for it.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  "While this may be true, the fact remains that you have a limited amount of time. As a matter of reality, you simply cannot spend an infinite amount of time with every customer." Perfect. This captures in a single sentence the trap you can get yourself into here. Lets start with the obvious, if your product is so impossible to use that you need infinite customer support hours with every customer in order to use it, well you need to pick a different line of work right? But lets start with the assumption that you make a fine product and customers like it. The reality is that every product has to teach the customer how to use it at some level, from the simple picture on your electric toothbrush telling you to plug in the base and put the toothbrush into the base, to a description of effects various tools achieve in Photoshop. You 1) sell the product, 2) customer buys it, 3) learns it, 4) uses it. Its up to your marketing department to get the customer between steps 1 and 2, its up to your support to get them between 3 and 4. Every time you have to help a customer between steps 3 and 4, if you feed that back into the product (design, documentation, execution) you mitigate the future chance of hitting that problem with another customer. Unless your product is infinitely complex (see my first point) then, like a legal contract that has grown to 6 pages because of the clauses that deal with each problem that came before, the amount of time you need to spend with customers goes down. What is more amazing is that new customers benefit from all the work you've put into making the product easy to use and they share that as 'delight' with their peers, who bring in more customers. This is the truth in this anecdote, you have a limited amount of time to succeed and every time you spend that time with a customer, helping to solve their problems with using your product, you gain much more time down the road. And you gain expertise in designing products in the future. If you read that discussion about the difference between 'years of experience' vs 'knowledge' this is it, in a nutshell. You as an entrepreneur become more valuable knowing about problems that customers will have, you as a company become more valuable because people learn to trust you, and your products become more valuable because all of that knowledge gets folded into them. There is no gamble here. There is no 'wasted' time. It is all useful time well spent, assuming you bring back the knowledge and incorporate it into your culture, and your products.

gte910h 14y ago

I've had "basic computer time" with customers before. Usually it doesn't pay off in direct dollars. But some of them I had to push them out the door with a stick they were so loyal by the end of the time they could use our stuff.

danilocampos 14y ago

I would posit that the much bigger gamble is taking a casual view of your obligations to customers. Word of mouth is a potent thing. A company that values chasing new dollars over taking care of existing customers isn't going to enjoy a good reputation. Moreover – customer support issues, properly handled, are a crucial window into your product's performance, reliability and usability. Every interaction you have with a customer impacts your brand. Sometimes you win the lottery. Other times you don't. But I'd much rather err on the side of giving a fuck. Anything less is revolting to me, both as a customer and as someone whose bills are paid by the existence of customers. If you sell something, the customers are your job.