The $4 Million Complaint Call

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.<p>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.<p>So thankful she sent me a box containing ... two giant Idaho potatoes, nearly a foot long each.<p>I said it wasn't small potatoes.

While I thoroughly enjoy the heartwarming part, I don't think that's why it's good advice from a business perspective.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

It all depends on the customer. Bob was apparently a nice guy who just needed a lot of help. I'd have helped him.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Eventually, he caused enough problems that they dumped him.<p>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.<p>I will probably never forget his name and the lesson I learned about how useful a 'bad' customer can be.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

Survivorship bias.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>"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."

I love stories like this. A couple of others that come to mind with a similar theme:<p>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.<p>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.)

This makes for a heartwarming magazine article but I don't think it's good advice.<p>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.<p>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.

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:<p>[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.]<p>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

IMO providing quality service and tech support is <i>the</i> most cost effective thing you can do to market your business bar none.<p>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.

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

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

&#62; 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."<p>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.<p>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.

As a support manager, I was ready to tweet "Always Listen to your support manager" until I saw it was $4MM in revenue...<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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

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

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.<p>While some people are sharp enough to see around the corners and figure out the end game not everybody is.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I love that story, thanks for sharing

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

This is a really great story

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.<p>This situation paid off, however you never know if the directors or companies may have discovered the business through other means.<p>I know this all sounds cynical but it's a careful balance of sensibility.

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%.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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"?

I wish at&#38;t would read that.

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