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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?"
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.
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Perhaps too plain and simple an answer.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
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.
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)