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?"

Comments

Drop them

[SoCalChris]

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

[kingkade]

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

[TheWanderingHermit]

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).

FP?

[dosius]

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.

Re:FP?

[TheWanderingHermit]

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 unhappy with them. Some people are just incapable of being satisfied because they have their own problems. You can't help them, you can't fix them. Let someone else waste time and resources on them.

You can take the attitude you're implying, but that means sinking a lot of resources into a losing endeavour and, in the long run, isn't worth the profit on the sale or even the profit on word of mouth because such people will never give you good word of mouth.

Re:FP?

[Tweekster]

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.

tough question

[frosty_tsm]

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?

[Phantombrain]

Ask them to give you a demonstration of the product and show you what's wrong with it, then work with them.

Re:Humor them

[andrewman327]

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.

Help them

[decep]

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.

How sure are you that you're right?

[blincoln]

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.

Five rules of thumb.

[Savage-Rabbit]

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.

Perhaps they want out?

[DuctTape]

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

The customer's network isn't your fault.

[attemptedgoalie]

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?

Be as creative as possible.

[botlrokit]

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 work with the customer as directly as possible (or explain as simply as you can what the readouts of the Task Manager Processes window actually represents), it actually helps to create the relationship that businesses really want with service providers.

(2) Another thing guiding their perception is spawned by the possibility that other systems may interfere with your systems. Your benchmarks and your test environment are not the same as theirs in production... what you see as a working, functioning model does not mean the outcome will be the same where they are.

Easiest example is like a network throughput test. You may see 100mbit full duplex, but they may work in a hubbed environment with a jabbering NIC somewhere on the network. Or a quiet network such as yours may not make multiple requests to the machine in question, but when they put it back online, it may be getting DoSsed out the yang.

(3) Last thing is to demonstrate the importance of your SLA, and what it does not cover. You must be firm about this, and explain that while your benchmarks indicate proper function, for a reasonable fee you can watch over their shoulder after it's reimplemented.

This becomes a cost/benefit exercise, but in one fell swoop, if you have the opportunity to visit his site, you might charge an hour's service wage to investigate on your own. Most often when I'm having to look at the impossible possibility, I have to open my mind as wide as possible, and consider as many variables as I reasonably can.

Keep your perspective as wide as possible. People don't always intend to insist things are your fault, but you better be aware of the fact that this customer will not be the first to bitch. If you succeed at solving the problem, you have both satisfied the customer, and demonstrated your ability to agreeably end hostile customer problems.

Get rid of them

[gweihir]

Some customers are unskilled and unaware of it (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.