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Dealing w/ Unsatisfied Customers?
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?"
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 tech job. I have had computers come to me after they have brought them to other dealers and I have found things wrong. Though I am sure you are good at what you do I recommend you check everything. Sometimes the check list does not cover everything. I know that everytime I sent my laptop into Toshiba Tech with a broken DVD drive it was certainly never tested as it always came back broken until I gave up and replaced it myself.
Having said that I have had one occurence where I could not find something wrong. The customer was saying that the computer was to slow. In that instance I called them up with some timings I had made. E.g. Word takes 10 sec to start etc. Asked them if this was the problem. I would send it back to them and have them time it. I eventually found out that thought everything was suppose to be instantnious.
So after all that my advice, phone them up. Have them walk you over the phone what is wrong with it. Then you can tell them either you cannot reduplicate the issue, or that you don't support that.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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. Southwest Airlines employees like to re-tell the story of the lady that wrote numerous complaint letters, objecting to many of Southwest's unique policies. The staff finally kicked one of her letters up to CEO Herb Kelleher. It took Kelleher sixty seconds to compose his response: Dear Mrs. Crabapple: We will miss you. Love, Herb. It isn't how it looks to him, it is how it looks to everyone else. That one sale will neither make nor break your business. If the rest of the general public is convinced that you treated him fairly and respectfully, listened to his problems, and made a serious effort to find and eliminate any possible problems, then you are ahead of the game. With those kinds of folks, I find it best to go a little overboard. When they complain to friends and neighbors that you didn't do what they wanted, they will be quizzed about what you did do. When the complainers describe the above-and-beyond things you did to fix their problem, first, the audience will disbelieve the complainer, and second, it might just generate some business. It often worked that way for me.
All is paradox. Retired lawyer, so this is just one more layman's opinion.
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 aren't going to be agreeable you still have a policy related to termination of contract or product refunds that will allow you a path to take. If it ends up in court then you can at least show that you adhered to the original contract by following the identified exit strategy.
Do you really think you will ever sway this customers opinion? For how long? And at what final cost?