Is the customer always right?

2 points by anujseth 9 years ago | 10 comments

After this email exchange I couldn’t really sleep last night. I am posting this here for advice from people more experienced than me, on how to deal with customers who just don’t seem to be ok with whatever you do. Maybe I was in the wrong and it is me who doesn’t get it. Please share suggestions, opinions, whatever.

In no way is this an attack/vendetta thing on the person/company and I have anonymised it to the best extent possible.

I have also not posted previous email exchanges with the said person because they are long and have him calling me “pissy” our design opinions “stupid” and the like. They are also not about this particular bug (more below) but other features in the app.

This particular bug is in the iOS version of our app, Tabata Stopwatch Pro (a Tabata and HIIT Timer) https://itunes.apple.com/app/id664563975 and affects just 1 thing. The voice announcements get reset if you swipe up to force close the app. Till date 4 people have complained about it and it is not a priority at all. In all cases I tell people to not swipe up to force close the app.

This is not an us versus them thing. I am genuinely not sure how to best accommodate our growing needs of users who just ask for feature after feature, and want their bugs fixed right now. Saying no just really makes some people un-happy.

The emails yesterday (edited slightly to make them more readable) are in a text file on this link (they are above the HN character limit to be posted directly and not sure if posting them in parts in comments would be right) https://1drv.ms/t/s!FpBqmKEOgVTliBxLajRtRVpuVlpxZyQM

taejo 9 years ago |

Can we banish "Have an awesome day" and the like from email signatures forever? Especially in support emails. It's at best insincere (you didn't even write it yourself: a machine added it to your email automatically) and at worst - in cases like this, where you're essentially telling the customer to piss off - infuriating.

onion2k 9 years ago |

You have completely failed this customer.

You've been incredibly rude to him, you've effectively just told him to go away and stop bothering you, and you've sold him a broken app. He isn't wrong - there's a bug in your app that you're refusing to fix, so if you get a negative review you absolutely deserve it.

Saying no just really makes some people un-happy.

You didn't say no. You CC's in the guy's HR department to try and get him some sort of disciplinary action in his job. That's a long way past saying no.

You really need to stop doing support yourself and hire someone who's actually good at it.

anujseth 9 years ago | |

Alright fair. But this is after offering refunds and explaining our position repeatedly. Still not ok?

onion2k 9 years ago | | |

Never OK, regardless of your position.

CyberFonic 9 years ago |

He's not a customer, he is a egotistical, self-entitled jerk!

You did the RIGHT THING! offering a refund and staying polite.

We all get such jerks pretending to be customers from time to time. Not worth losing any sleep over nor wasting more time with emails.

If you can, set-up an auto-responder for that email domain:

"We are disappointed that our product fails to meets your needs. Please uninstall the app and accept our refund and you will no longer have any more problems with this app."

anujseth 9 years ago | |

Have been offering a refund from day 1 (months back) and the person just keeps finding more problems/feature requests but won't take their money back.

We rarely get these, most users love our apps and repeatedly tell us our customer support is exceptional. I will consider the auto responder thank you.

Cypher 9 years ago |

You're really bad at support. I don't know why you didn't just fix it in the time you spend responding to emails, its not really that hard.

DanBC 9 years ago |

I didn't read the emails, the link is dead.

You might want to search HN for "toxic customer", which returns some submissions and some useful comments.

anujseth 9 years ago | |

I didn't think anyone would be interested in the emails anymore. It's back up https://1drv.ms/t/s!AJBqmKEOgVTliB0

anujseth 9 years ago |

No new comments in a few hours and the post is now buried. Link to mails is now dead.

Thank you for your suggestions.