> A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem.
I occasionally get rude customer service emails at my startup, and in nearly every case the person apologizes after receiving a personal reply (from the founder, in my case) within 24 hours.
In many cases, the customer actually becomes an advocate for us. Once they understand that what they want (to be able to use our text enhancement within Kindle/gdocs/iBooks/Nook) is not something that my startup can do on its own, they will offer to reach out to the relevant BigCo and ask for them to build an integration.
Basically, people who will take the effort to reach out to complain to me are more likely to be willing to reach out to another company as well.
I have had to fire a few aholes from my SaaS. They would ask a question, get an answer, do the wrong thing, then call my support team member profanities. So I just refund their last bill and delete their account, and send them to a specific competitor I don’t like.
I occasionally get rude customer service emails at my startup, and in nearly every case the person apologizes after receiving a personal reply (from the founder, in my case) within 24 hours.
In many cases, the customer actually becomes an advocate for us. Once they understand that what they want (to be able to use our text enhancement within Kindle/gdocs/iBooks/Nook) is not something that my startup can do on its own, they will offer to reach out to the relevant BigCo and ask for them to build an integration.
Basically, people who will take the effort to reach out to complain to me are more likely to be willing to reach out to another company as well.