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

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).

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