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Dealing w/ Unsatisfied Customers? 112

Posted by Cliff from the patience-is-a-virtue dept.
MoOsEb0y wonders: "At the company I work at, we have set up a series of SLAs giving a list of things they expect our products to do, that we promise we will deliver. In my particular situation, I have a customer who claims that the product we delivered them was slow and unresponsive. However, when we tested it to try and determine what was wrong, we didn't find anything wrong with it. How do you deal with a customer who is bent on assuming that you are incompetent, and that he or she could never have unreasonable expectations?"
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Dealing w/ Unsatisfied Customers? More

Dealing w/ Unsatisfied Customers?

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  • Drop them (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SoCalChris ( 573049 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:15PM (#15850247) Journal
    Some customers just aren't worth having. It's a tough choice to make sometimes, but every now and then you've got to drop a customer.

    • Re:Drop them (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kingkade ( 584184 )
      Right, just drop a customer? Word of mouth may get around depending on your business. Besides why would you preemptively drop the customer?? At least lose the customer trying to solve their complaint. Unless it costs you a ridiculous number of man hours or their complaint is about something that you said you cannot support, there's no point to dumping the guy. Even so, politely tell them it'll be in the next version or the real reasons you can not do what's needed.

      • Re:Drop them (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheWanderingHermit ( 513872 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:56PM (#15850388)
        This is where my time working in residential treatment in a psych hospital has helped me a lot in running my own business. Reality doesn't matter: people's perception of reality does. In a case like the one described, the customer has decided that the company is inept, or that this one person is inept. He's sure of that. In my experience, both in business, which includes watching other business owners, and in treatment, is that when a person is constantly making claims that are verifiably false, there is no way that you'll convince them you can do a good job. You can replace the equipment with something that goes twice as fast and does twice as much for free. They *may* thank you, but will soon complain because there's something else the new equipment doesn't do. People like that are never happy, and the problem is NOT you, it's them.

        You can keep trying to help, which one should do for a while, but if they keep pushing, you're better off offering them a full refund and accepting a return, or just giving them a refund and letting them keep the equipment. Why? Because they're just never going to be happy. There's no point in busting your tail for good word of mouth with a bitter person who is never happy with anything. He'll probably keep telling you how great his last supplier was. Call his last supplier and talk with them and you'll find out that he treated them the same way.

        When you get a customer that bad, as Joshua said, "Strange game, Dr. Falken. The only way to win is not to play." Word of mount is great, but when you get a complainer, there is no way to win and the more time you spend on him, the more he'll expect. It's even worse if that kind of person got a good deal in the first place.

        I've had customers that, for one reason or another, got our service for a lower price, and if you have a complainer that manages that, they're even worse. They don't appreciate what they're getting because it's cheap to them, and they end up expecting a lot more than what you do for other clients. I don't know about you, but my life is too short to deal with such people. We fire those customers. As for word of mouth, most people know such a person for what he is: a whiner and complainer. Few listen to what they say. The few people that are their friends are probably like them and I'd rather my competition get them as clients. I'd rather they get frustrated employees or a loss in profit from someone like that than us getting that. If people don't appreciate our product and our pricing structure, then they're welcome to try the competition (which, in my case, is made up of bad programmers with no business or people skills, so I don't have too much to worry about).

        • Re:Drop them (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 ) <RealityMaster101@gmail. c o m> on Friday August 04, 2006 @11:35PM (#15850526) Homepage Journal

          I agree with you 100%. I've had to drop a few customers like that in my time.

          Heh, I'm reminded of a story that took place in the early 90s, when I was involved with a medical system start-up. Now, these systems were pretty pricey, and I was doing some technical pre-sales support out at this hospital site. Now, the tech guy there was a real arrogant a-hole. I had been taking a lot for a number of days.

          So we set up a demo system for him. Normally, our system used either X-terminals or Windows running eXceed (X-terminal emulation software). But this guy was a TOTAL IBM-a-holic. He worshiped at the alter of OS/2, and insisted we use OS/2 with IBM's X-terminal software. All right, we said, X is X, right?

          Wrong, unfortunately. IBM's X server sucked big time and had a lot of problems. So the guy is giving me these fishy looks in a big meeting with some of his other guys. I say something about the limitations of what I can fix when the X server has bugs, and then he crosses his arms, and says,

          "Well, whose problem *is* that?" (expecting me to roll over and admit the customer is always right, and promise to do what I can to fix it).

          But I'd had enough. My response, "Well, it's YOUR problem, since you specced OS/2."

          Dead silence. The guy's jaw dropped open, like no one had ever dared to speak to him like that. He huffed and puffed and blustered, and we moved onto a different subject. Later on, one of his guys took me aside and said, "I can't believe you said that to him."

          I responded that I didn't care. If it runs like crap in that hospital, then we're better off not selling it to them and poisoning the whole area. I think I even said that they didn't deserve to own the software, heh. :D

          Funny enough, the big boss and I got along much better after that. I think I earned his respect. He still insisted on OS/2, but he stopped blaming us.

        • Re:Drop them (Score:4, Interesting)

          by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @02:17PM (#15852842) Homepage
          I worked for an ISP for a number of years, doing tech support. Of course we had our share of customers who'd complain about every tech they spoke with and expected the impossible. No matter how good their connection was it wasn't fast enough or clear enough. Every little hickup on their side was blamed on us. When we identified a customer as impossible to satisfy, we'd regretfully send them this letter:


          Dear customer:


          We have been examining the history of your account with us and seen a large number of problems, issues and complaints. Apparantly, we are unable to provide you with a level of service you find acceptable. Therefore, we are going to maintain your account for 30 days to let you find another providor then terminate the service. We wish you the best of luck with your new service and hope you find them more acceptable.


          This was a win-win situation. We got rid of the troublemaker, somebody else had to deal with them and the troublemaker couldn't even complain that we'd not given them a chance because we'd started out by accepting responsibility. (Note, however, that we never admitted that the customer's expectations were reasonable.)

          • I worked at a national ISP where a guy complained so much that he worked his way all the way to the VP. VP put a stop to it right there, sent an email to him that was very similar and instructed us to watch for him to check his mail. As soon as we saw that he grabbed his mail and logged off, we canceled his account. Within 5 minutes, he was trying to sign on again with no luck.

            I think that was the best case of customer service I have ever served out.
            • We had a similar case once with an obstreperous customer. Finally, he sent us an email threatening to sue us. The appropriate person read the message and called the customer's office. Said customer wasn't in, but his personal assistant was. She left a message telling him that either he called back within one hour to discuss the threat or she'd cancel his account. He didn't and she did. When the word got out, tech support gave her a standing ovation for getting rid of a troublemaker that every tech had
        • Setting expectations is a critical part of sales and support. If your customers have unreasonable expectations about your product/service you have some responsibility for that (or, at least the support and sales staff they've been in contact with do). I agree that you should "drop them" but you need to do it in a way that leaves them open to revisiting the whole thing one day. Don't just throw up your hands and toss their money back at them, own the mistake that was made when the product/services capabiliti
          • You're working with the assumption that the company is always at fault to some degree. It is worth evaluating to see if there is fault within the company, but in my experience, if there is a customer that is so unpleasant that I've decided to fire them, we're dealing with a chronic griper.

            Again, speaking as someone with about a decade of experience in residential treatment, sometimes you can take on a customer, do your best to please them, and do nothing wrong, and still have continual complaints from them

      • Re:Drop them (Score:5, Informative)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:59PM (#15850400) Journal
        80/20 rule in bussiness. You spend 80% of the time on %20 of the problems or in this case annoying customers. Sometimes its best to let a competitor waste his resources on.

        I know that sounds very unAmerician in this customer is god concept if your American but its true.

        Just becarefull that you dont keep knocking off customers here and there until you wont have anymore. I have seen customers threaten former pc shops where I work with violence or come in and dude you are going to be soooo sorry bla bla. Not worth your time and could threaten the morale of yoru workers dealing with such jerks. A customer is not god and it only makes sense to serve them if its profitable.

        • "I have seen customers threaten former pc shops where I work with violence or come in and dude you are going to be soooo sorry bla bla."

          This has happened to me, rather recently actually. I work for a domain registration and hosting company, and the customer in question just happened to live about 3 miles from our office. About 4 months ago, his problem was that he was trying to transfer his domain and wanted us to unlock it, but he could not verify any info we requested - userID, password, security ques
        • Sometimes its best to let a competitor waste his resources on.

          In fact, why stop there?

          "Look, it's obvious I'll never be able to please you. But I don't like to part with customers on bad terms, so what I suggest you do is call [insert name of competitor] - their product's slightly different to mine and is perhaps more appropriate to someone with your requirements".
          • A long time ago, I worked as a basic hourly wage-slave in a photo finishing shop. We were (until it got bought by a national chain, but that's another story) a fairly high-end place. We charged more, we took longer, but we did much better work than your average minilab. In general, we had very satisfied customers. But every once in a while we had people that were just chronic complainers.

            Usually the worst would be somebody who fancied themselves to be Ansel Adams, but in reality was so incompetent they coul

      • Re:Drop them (Score:3, Informative)

        by tacocat ( 527354 )

        Regardless of how you treat him, he's probably not going to be a very good word of mouth public relations element anyways. There's nothing wrong with dropping a customer if you do it in an agreeable manner. You need an exit strategy. This is an idea often ignored. But if you do a cost/benefit analysis you will find that there is a certain point where the customer goes from a profitable relationship into a liability and it is in your companies best interest to exit from the relationship.

        Even if they are

      • Well, being a business owner, I ALMOST agree with the GP. Sometimes this isn't an option because of contracts or other outstanding agreements, but it seems like I attract customers that are never happy, no matter what you do for them. Example - I have a nameless client that I agreed to complete a project with 10 hours of labor with very specific terms. I have now sunk in 30 hours of labor, it's gone way out of scope, they refuse to pay overage, and the project still isn't done.

        Now what do you do? The pr
        • it seems like I attract customers that are never happy, no matter what you do for them.

          If it's one or two people, they're a problem. If it's most of them, as your post seems to suggest, then you might want to rethink your line of business. Maybe you're just not very good at it?

          I'm reminded of the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide - "Someone was terribly incompetant and he hoped it wasn't him."
          • Nah, it's not most of them. It's just that the one or two are the most vocal of the bunch and the ones I have to deal with the most as a result. Weeding out those "one or two" would go a long way towards making me a happier person. Too bad at least one of them is in a long term deal with my other partners, and alienating them would alienate my partners as well, so I have to endure. The other I'm in the process of moving to another provider as we speak.
            • Every business has customers like that, but you made it sound like it was a lot, "I seem to attract them". It's just taht assholes always stand out.
        • Example - I have a nameless client that I agreed to complete a project with 10 hours of labor with very specific terms. I have now sunk in 30 hours of labor, it's gone way out of scope, they refuse to pay overage, and the project still isn't done.

          If you've done that, then you've already screwed up. You needed to have stood up to the guy and insisted on overage somewhere around hour 12.

    • Agreed. Sometimes a customer wastes so many man-hours and returned items that they're just not worth the hassle - just politely point out your competitors (assuming you're the manager or otherwise have authority to do so) and suggest they go there. Sure they'll huff and puff and go "WELL! How rude!" but contrary to popular consumer opinion they don't have a god given right to even be in your shop, let alone have their feet kissed by the staff. Sure, it's one person who will probably give your place a ba
    • Often times one bad customer comes with a group of 299 good ones. You can't just drop one.
      • I did not word that well. Often times, your customer is a company or organization with 300 people. You cannot drop the one problematic person, for obvious reasons.

  • The Bottom Line. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by violent.ed ( 656912 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:15PM (#15850249)
    You Can't. You Just Can't. Let a higher-up manager deal with them. That's what they get paid for.
    • Higher-up managers also get issued pointy sticks when they are promoted to the position.

      The pointy sticks are for dealing with employee morale and customer support issues.

      MoOsEb0y must be a very good employee if he is not aware of this fact.

      /Pointy sticks are about the only thing that hasn't happened to Dilbert

  • FP? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dosius ( 230542 ) <bridget@buric.co> on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:16PM (#15850251) Journal
    You can't always assume the customer is always right... sometimes they're just wrong and you just have to let them know. It's all you can do. :/

    -uso.
    • > You can't always assume the customer is always right...

      "The customer is always right" doesn't mean what you think it does.

      • Re:FP? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TheWanderingHermit ( 513872 )
        It does.

        You're thinking it means even when they're wrong, they're right.

        That's not true and if you spend the time needed on customers that complain no matter what you do, you lose a lot of money trying to satisfy someone who will never be happy. That kind of customer is wrong -- wrong for your business, wrong headed, and just plain in need of a decade of therapy.

        The customer is not always right. You deal with the ones that you can and the ones that are never happy -- let them go to your competition and be
      • The customer is NOT always right. He is, however, the one paying your bills.

        • Re:FP? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Tweekster ( 949766 )
          If he is wasting my time, then he can "pay" someone elses bills while I deal with profitable clients.

          Most businesses simply arent in a desperate need for every single client they can get. Most business like the clients can easily choose who they do business with.
          • True; it is up to both the customer and business owner to maintain the business relationship. If a customer is too expensive (say, your customer runs off other customers) you have every right and probably obligation to dump him as a customer.

            But too many business owners (e.g., record companies) think they are ENTITLED to money. You're not. You're only entitled to money customers are willing to trade for your goods or services.

  • Humor them (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kingkade ( 584184 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:16PM (#15850252)
    Due diligence is important though so make sure you actually do try to find their problems. If nothing's found, humor them and say you've looked into the problem. Try to get their system specs, environment settings, etc, etc, ad nauseum and they'll learn they better be able to provide a lot of detials next time they decide to report a complaint on a whim if that's the case.

    • Re:Humor them (Score:3, Insightful)

      by andrewman327 ( 635952 )
      Better yet: try to actually look at their computer that is running so poorly. If they run it on laptops or in a horizontal enviroment, they could bring you their computer and replicate the error. Even if it runs on a desktop, if the problem is serious enough they could consider bringing it in. Try to get the exact enviroment in which the alleged error is occuring.

    • Re:Humor them (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sumdumass ( 711423 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @12:00AM (#15850631) Journal
      I couldn't agree more. I had a hard case were a customer purchased a new computer and because of not only certain software he installed but because of the way he was using the damn thing caused a memory leak and after hours of work, it just froze up losing every thing he did for the last hour or so.

      As it turned out, he installed Microsoft office 2000 (from an internet download site) on a windows 98 computer and only updated to service pack one or so. He then installed some sermon writing program and wrote his sunday sermons on office so he could place an outline in powerpoint and project it durring the church service. There was some obscure problem wich was fixed in later service packs (sp2 i think, been a while) that caused a memory leak when copy and pasting from hyperlinked documents. It wasn't untill I observed the crash and the way the computer was being used before I could pinpoint the problem. I guess service pack two or later checked for authenticity of the microsft office product and he was afraid it would cause problems with him having it installed on two different computers and not owning a legit copy.

      It was one month, four complete wipe and reloads plus replacing almost every component before the problem got to me. After two weeks of not being able to reproduce the problem I decided to have him show it too me (and showed him how to operate the autosave feature). The problem didn't become clear until I noticed the only difference (outside the parts) between his old computer and new was the office service packs. Sure enough I found a reference to a fix for something resembling the problem in the SP2 release notes.

        He had bad mouthed us, verbaly abused the counter girls and techs, made claims that we sold junk computers, trash talked us at his church and finaly threatend to file a lawsuite against us. It was good to explain to him the problem was because he installed pirated software and wouldn't apply the patches because he was afraid of getting caught. I found records were we installed the Office service packs on his old computer when it was serviced previously wich is why it didn't act the same. Needless to say, after I explained the office issue and the problem couldn't be recreated after the service pack update, he still tried to claim he was right and still maintained if it was a good computer, it wouldn't have had the problem. We then filed a slander and liebel suite against him. As part of the judgment, he had to mention in a newspaper add that he was wrong, uninformed to the workings of a computer and was the cause of the problems he was complaining about. He was also barred from entering our premises again.

      That shop is out of business now, the owner died in a jet ski accident while drinking too much and his family had to liquidate to pay the damages. IT probably wouldn't have lasted too much longer because of all the preacher said at the church and stuff ruined any positive word of mouth advertising and made a quite a few other clients go elswere. In hind site, we should have just refunded his money and told him to go somewere else. But after we were commited, we had to solve the issue one way or another.
      • Wouldn't a solution also be to sue him for defamation? It's overused, but that particular charge exists for a reason.
        • Probably, i was just a part time employee who worked with the stuff giving them issues in my spare time. I think lawsuites were in progress until the owner got drunk on a jetski and rammed a boat killing himself and injuring several of the boaters including sinking the boat.

          If that hadn't transpired, defamation, slander and probably liable would have been the grounds. instead, a complete sell off of everything from equiptment to the building the shop was located in, happened to cover the fines and lawsuite

      • wtf? (Score:2)

        by woolio ( 927141 )
        As it turned out, he installed Microsoft office 2000 (from an internet download site) on a windows 98 computer and only updated to service pack one or so. He then installed some sermon writing program and wrote his sunday sermons on office so he could place an outline in powerpoint and project it durring the church service.

        whoa.... Let's recap
        • A religious clergyman apparently forgot Thou shalt not steal.
        • The aforementioned person was running Windows 98.
        • The aforementioned person was using Powerpoint.
        • The af
        • It's more common than you think. When I moved to the town I live in now, I got asked one Sunday at a church to go to the backroom and use a computer w/ Win98 and PPT to swap pages between the hymns. As for the stealing part, it's the reason i've sorta taken an extended vacation from Church. The hypocrisy was a bit strong to accept. With a variety of preachers, etc. like these [wikipedia.org] fine [wikipedia.org] people [wikipedia.org] doing things that run contrary to the teachings, what do you do?

  • tough question (Score:3, Insightful)

    by frosty_tsm ( 933163 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:17PM (#15850256)
    I've been in that situation, and it's not fun.

    If you can't track down a cause for the problem, the best you can do is explain to them the limitations of the product and product development, etc. If they are saying the product is unresponsive when it's just being a little slow, then that's not going to work. If it really becomes a big problem, you may need to refer them to the engineering team.

    Just hope the engineer doesn't say "I'm a people person, damnit!"

  • Demonstration? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Phantombrain ( 964010 )
    Ask them to give you a demonstration of the product and show you what's wrong with it, then work with them.
  • Let me guess, is this [youtube.com] the customer at work testing your so-called "incompetent" product?

  • Use my patented method (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    'Tell them to fuck off'

    Also, refer to:
    http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=3853 [somethingawful.com]
    and
    http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=3885 [somethingawful.com]

  • Help them (Score:3, Insightful)

    by decep ( 137319 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:28PM (#15850293)
    If the customer is important enough then try to see the problems from their perspective; give them the benefit of the doubt. Assign a customer-oriented, technical person to be onsite to see the "problem" first-hand. See if it really is a problem (bug or implementation) or just an expectation problem. The absolute worst thing to do is dismiss it outright.

    If it is too much trouble for your organization, give your customer the names of some competing product or another product that will fit the task and send them on their way.

  • Nothing positive to say about this (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Hey

    I don't mean to flame, but I have been in the opposite position. I have had a laptop where it will fail something like Memtest, I will send it in and the technicians will say I am not a tech and that there is nothing wrong according to their certified tools. I have had hard drive failuers that techs could not detect and I have had broken keyboard where the one letter (q I believe) only worked if you pushed really hard on it and the technician has said it was normal.

    Since all of that I have moved into a t

  • How sure are you that you're right? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blincoln ( 592401 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:46PM (#15850356) Homepage Journal
    It's possible that you're wrong, and the product really is performing poorly for them, and not because of a legitimate reason like "the server is slow because so many people are using it simultaneously."

    I have been on both sides in situations like this where the service provider or vendor was wrong. I've made the mistake of jumping to conclusions when I couldn't replicate the problem, or when I thought the customer was being unreasonable. I've also had to deal with people who were clearly making the same mistake, and it cost them any future business from me.

    My advice would be that if they're still convinced it's a problem, either go see it in person (if this is an expensive product), or offer them a full refund.
    • Seconded. A business relationship should ideally be profitable in some way for both sides.

      Don't assume the customer is an idiot and doesn't know what they are doing, but at the same time, recognize that some relationships are unsustainable for you as a vendor due to whatever reason. If there is nothing you can do for them, offer them a refund and move on. Ill feelings (or being "right") on either side is not worth it in this short life.

  • Five rules of thumb. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Savage-Rabbit ( 308260 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @10:57PM (#15850391)
    1. No matter how difficult it may be, always be calm and agonizingly polite. If the customers thinks you are being smug, superior or god forbid implying they are stupid you will quickly discover that it is actually possible for somebody to shout so loudly into a telephone that your eardrum will burst.
    2. Never claim that the customer is wrong unless you can prove it. If he/she claims you or somebody at your company screwed up, be polite, take the customers word for it for the moment and then check the situation out if you are lucky you will prove them wrong if not prepare to eat crow for whoever screwed up and contact the customer. At this point it might be appropriate to keep rule #1 in mind.
    3. Always remember to cover your ass by keeping a 'paper trail' of your interaction with the customer. By that I mean archive your e-mail and snail mail (back when I dealt with customers a lot I actually got people dredging up 2,3 and 4 year old support issues) and tape any conversations if your company offers this facility which a lot of them do these days. If not ask customers to repeat important requests or statements they make on the phone by e-mail so you have a record of it.
    4. If the customer keeps coming back with totally unreasonable claims and you can't get rid of them take the papertrail to one of the PHB's explain the matter to them and have the PHB contact the customer that's the PHB's job if worst comes to worst the PHB can sick a lawyer on the customers lawyer and you can enjoy the ensuing mudslinging contest.
    5. Always remember to keep a regular lookout for a new job that does not involve frequent contact with customers.

  • You do everything you can to try to find the true problem, then you work with the client to find an acceptable solution. If your client is similar to this computer store customer [google.com] [Video], then you take the appropriate action. Watch the video to the very end to see how to handle the situation properly.

  • I try to please them as much as I can without giving them oral. If that doesn't work, then I point them to a piece [deviantart.com] I did just recently, explicating how they make me feel.

    Seriously though, sometimes you just have to guage how much you value that customer. I work in the newspaper industry (art, advertising, and new media), and when a print product doesn't come out like they wanted, we'll determine if it's our fault or theirs. Usually, we'll give them a free run in the paper, sometimes even if it is their

  • Perhaps they want out? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DuctTape ( 101304 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @11:22PM (#15850494)
    It could very well be that the customer realized that they just bought something that was either totally inappropriate or that they spent more than they should, so now they're trying to get out of it by complaining so much that you'll give them their money back somehow, some way. Better to do that than to lose face and admit their idiocy.

    Perhaps too plain and simple an answer.

    DT

    • This is just along the lines of what I was thinking. People often take up positions such as "your software is slow" or "your company is inept" when in reality it is some other interest that they actually need fulfilled. Sometimes when you are dealing with a stubborn customer the best thing to do is calm down, start asking questions about their whole experience and find out what they are really after. "your product is slow" could mean they had a bad experience with a salesperson or as ductape said that they
  • I am probably on the opposite side of this kind of situation. We even had the vendor come in and do a complete analysis during one of our busiest times. They gave us a report that told us nothing new. Thier excuse? The next version, due any day now, is supposed to be faster then the old one and they only give us 7 months to upgrade to it(no,, not really, but in our case, we're a college....you DON'T launch new products during the Fall quarter! Which means we launch in April for summer registration, our lo
  • While I'm sure this is a simplified summary of what occurred, there needs to be more investigation into the problem than, "It looks fine to me." What exactly is slow, how slow is it, when is it slow? What is unresponsive, how unresponsive is it, when is it unresponsive?
    It could very well be that the customer has found some part that is slow and unresponsive, or it could just as easily be that the customer has unrealistic expectations and you need to show them a competitor's product and say, "see, it is ju

  • The customer's network isn't your fault. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by attemptedgoalie ( 634133 ) on Friday August 04, 2006 @11:44PM (#15850565)
    I have had many issues where a customer's overzealous internal network security slowed EVERYTHING they did down. But they wouldn't talk about their apps, only ours.

    Does the app run in an environment that doesn't have as much connection to anything they might have broken internally?

    Do the guy's co-workers think it's slow as well, or is this person insane?
  • The number of people out there who will complain just for the sake of complaining...for entertainment purposes...is shockingly high.

    It's best to keep your distance from these people, as they are selfish and unpredictable.

  • Refund (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @12:01AM (#15850637)
    I worked on a plugin that's being sold today. One of the things I pushed for early on is that we can offer refunds for people that cannot get it working, even if the fault's on their end instead of ours. As a result, we're pretty quick to say "If we cannot get this working, don't worry, we'll give you your money back." It has been my experience that most customers that hear this early on are happier to work with us troubleshooting the problem. It puts them into a position of feeling like we're truely trying to help them, plus it relieves them of the burden of trying to prove it's our fault. We've had a few hundred sales, and we've only issued a couple of refunds. To the best of my knowledge, we don't have any unhappy customers, and that includes the two we gave refunds to. (Heck, they may even come back when they have some time to put into troubleshooting.)

    I don't know if you can offer a refund or not, but I thought I'd suggest it. I can tell you from personal experience that inability to get your money back is one of the biggest frustrations with support problems. If you can get the money element off the table, you may enjoy a better support experience.
  • You have opportunities in the short timeframe presented by the interaction with the customer. In those moments, there are a variety of things to consider:

    (1) Their perception is completely based on their inability to properly understand how the system works... or worse, they don't want to know. If what they feel is stirred by their ignorance, you can't beat that until you demonstrate (with a LOT of patience) that it does work.

    This technique is more valuable than most people consider, because when you wor

  • Get rid of them (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @12:30AM (#15850746)
    Some customers are unskilled and unaware of it [apa.org] (PDF link, 254kB). There is nothing you can do. In these people the level of incompetence is high enough that they cannot recognize their own inability. The only thing you can do is stay away from them. Don't explain, don't try to make it right. You cannot. Limit your losses and get rid of them. If nothing else helps, take the device back and give them a full refound.

  • > In my particular situation, I have a customer who claims that the product we delivered them was slow and unresponsive. However, when we tested it to try and determine what was wrong, we didn't find anything wrong with it.

    Sorry, you'll have to be more specific.
    • In my particular situation, I have a customer who claims that the product we delivered them was slow and unresponsive.

      Customer: "Hey, Funkmaster Fresh Fly , those girls you sent over took two hours to get here, and they were nodding off on heroin when they arrived. They just lay there drooling!"

      However, when we tested it to try and determine what was wrong, we didn't find anything wrong with it.

      Funkmaster Fresh Fly: "Yeah, we fucked those bitches hard and they was squirmin' around and yellin' and shit. Mayb
  • This is a situation where you should have a warrantability document that they must read before you do business with them. It doesn't have to be incredibly complex. You can google for thousands of examples of disclaimers of warrantability. I've been in the hospitality/restaurant business, and the IT sector as a small businessman for quite a while.

    In the hospitality industry, usually, they just want someone to listen to them whine for a while because they are lonely. I find the ones that have a *legitimat
  • There's nothing wrong with firing a customer and/or client if they cost you more than you will ever make from them. Bad customers must be shown the door, then they become your competitions problem. Let the bad customer suck the life out of your competition instead of you.
  • I have found that the most effective way to handle any client is to fully adress the situation at hand, and not just the technical issues (or percieved issues). All aspects of the situation must be examined with care. Be calm. Listen to everything the client tells you (and do not interrupt him/her) then repeat the situation back to the customer to make sure that you both have the same understanding of the situation. Also document everything. Be thorough. Record all indications of trouble, either state
  • We had a POS (point of sale) / inventory system that would occasionally freeze for everyone for exactly 3 minutes. There were also times where it'd slow to about 1/20th of it's normal speed (3 second report might take a minute) until the database server (just the service) was restarted. I never could find any network problems to explain it, and the server was pretty idle almost all the time. Maybe the author believed us, but it was never resolved. Eventually we just made the costly switch to something else.
  • Challenge them to find a better product.
  • Some dumb and sort-of-unrelated observations: It isn't how it looks to you, it is how it feels to him. I was walking out of the courthouse with a client after the judge ruled against us. My client told me not to worry about it. He said I had clearly presented his case. He knew there was a chance of losing, and he had lost the gamble. He thought he had received justice because he had his side clearly and eloquently presented, and he felt the judge had ruled against him on one of the marginal points. S
  • Usually I come in late in the game when the customer is already unsatisfied, and most of the time for very good reasons. I don't know who you're dealing with or at what stage in the game you enter, but none of my customers are in any position to judge my competence in my expertise, otherwise they wouldn't require my help. I do know people who can judge my competence in my expertise, but they are not my customers

    "I have a customer who claims that the product we delivered them was slow and unresponsive. Howe
  • http://ratsound.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=L i ve_Gig_Board;action=display;num=1149666887;start=9 #9 [ratsound.com]

    Rat Sound Message Board
    General
    Doing the Gig (Moderator: Forum Admin)
    when singers throw your mics around!

    While the issues may be different, the idea of taking a PROBLEM and rendering it into an opportunity is the same.

    I feel that establishing a fair and positive method of getting reimbursed for damaged gear is both professional and wise.

    I just wanted to comment

  • I have a customer who claims that the product we delivered them was slow and unresponsive. However, when we tested it to try and determine what was wrong, we didn't find anything wrong with it.

    Steve Ballmer is MoOsEb0y?
  • I'm not working in technology (I'm in university and working a summer job in dealing with conferences on campus) but I have a ton of interaction with customers. Specifically, we have a huge group (~1200) of elderly schoolteachers here. These people expect hotel level care and convenience from a fairly spread out dormitory campus, which we just aren't prepared to provide.

    We do as much as we can (a 24 hour help desk, for instance; I'm working 16 hour days with generous OT), but eventually you need to tell p

  • when we tested it to try and determine what was wrong, we didn't find anything wrong with it

    Try having the customer use your product, with you looking over their shoulder. I'm sure whatever testing environment you have set up is different from their deployed environment. That means going on-site. When you pay the time and money to take care of your customers, they will notice it, and your relationship will improve. It might even bring you referral business.

    How do you deal with a customer who is bent on ass

  • You need to find out what is really happening. Often, the users are experiencing problems. I deal with industrial applications. Generally, I assume the users are having problems, and I am not getting accurate enough descriptions to debug with.

    Often, the problems are real. It is just the cause that is not obvious.

  • Most comments here seem to be (unjustly) bagging the customer for their own ineptitude. Without more information about your product it's difficult to say, but it's possible that the customer is correct and is actually experiencing slow operation due to link latency between their site and yours. If you're testing the product's correct operation from your local network (instead of connecting from a remote ISP's dial-up or DSL link) of course it will seem fine.

    Remote users of MS Outlook's MAPI client, for exa

  • All this SLA, technical support, loser/user interaction reminds me of...
    Well, I don't know if the younger /.ers were exposed to him. The BOFH.

    Excerpt:
    So, to relieve the boredom, I get some iron filings and pour them into the back of my Terminal until it fizzes out (Which doesn't take all that long, surprisingly enough), then call our maintenance contractors and log a fault on the device. Sometimes they'll send someone who knows what they're doing, but it's a lot more fun when they don't - which is about 98%

  • Process correctly (Score:3, Interesting)

    by meburke ( 736645 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @09:20PM (#15853946)
    I get this all the time. I've been troubleshooting systems since the mid-60's, and now I get a lot of calls to fix systems that other techs and engineers failed to fix. One thing I've learned over all those years, is that 90% of problems on most projects (including my own) are due to inadequate design and specifications in the beginning.

    A problem is a discrepancy between the way things are and the way you want and expect them to be. All problems have a specific description, and elements of timing, location and scope. In order to resolve a customer's problem you must have agreement UP FRONT about what the resolved problem looks like in description, timing, location and scope. Without that agreement about "how you know when the problem is solved" you will just keep tracking unspecified problems. Precision is ultimately important.

    Now, if one of my projects fails to perform within the environment, time and extent that I promised, I fix it. Occasionally the customer has an additional requirement (change orders, anyone?). If I can profitably meet the customer's requirements, I will. Some projects are not worth fixing. In less than one percent of my projects have I had to give a refund or a discount, but I'm willing to do so if that will get some projects out of my hair. As has already been said, some customers are not worth having. I usually find this out when I try to get proper agreement on the specs and prices.

    Occasionally I find there are conditions outside my control that keep the project from performing like the customer expects. I will work with just about anyone to help alleviate these problems, but if it works correctly in my test environment, and if the test environment is spec'd at the design phase, and if the customer agreed to the test environment, then it's not my problem. (The last problem I had like that, about 4 years ago, the customer changed telephone systems just before I installed the project, and the new system had some incompatible idiosyncracies. The customer paid extra for me to resolve the problem.)

    If you are not trained in a formal problem resolution process, I recommend starting with "The New Rational Manager" by Kepner and Tregoe. Good luck
  • I see the solution in placing enough numerical thresholds, which can be precisely tested. Once the performance can be precisely evaluated using scientific method (and not subjective "feel"), customer can either proove fault using scientific method, or be satisfied with the product.
  • I can say that I have been on the customer side of this crappy equation, and it pisses me off. If their expectations were too high, then you need to reign in your sales-weasel that promised them the moon and the stars. If they aren't getting the functionality that can reasonably be expected, then you need to fix your software. In my case, the company told us that "We don't know why our software keeps crashing on your systems, but it had to be your fault because it works fine for us here. Let us know wha
  • What are you people thinking? How do you stay in business with all these refunds you're giving out? The ONLY time you give a refund is when you do not deliever as promised. That means selling your product for what it is. Don't ever tell someone that your system will turn lead into gold, and if it does, then it does it at its own pace. Level of proformance should not be implied, as you cannot guarantee that. Only infomercials promise to do something at break-neck speeds. ATi doesn't tell you that you'

  • How do you deal with a customer who is bent on assuming that you are incompetent, and that he or she could never have unreasonable expectations?

    Either you're dealing with a customer who isn't worth the effort, or you really aren't trying hard enough to solve the customer's problem.

    I've called many tech support desks where the help treated me as if I was being unreasonable, but the tech was being incompetent. Here are some examples:

    • I was having problems with my cable modem, and according to the manual,
  • Phrases like ..claims that the product we delivered them was slow and unresponsive.. really means
    Time for Hookers and Booze.

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