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How do you deal with annoying customers? Time vampires, needy, stress puppies etc.?
moonmartin
Member
Most hosters here probably know what i am talking about.
The guy why gets the minimum plan but expects premium 24/7 support. Oh how they love to open trouble tickets for any little thing that always seems to be "URGENT", "ASAP" etc. Heaven forbid you take more than 15minutes to respond.
Comments
You deal with them using your contracts and SLAs ;-)
In the real world, where everyone claims 24/7 unlimited premium support even if they are selling $5 per year servers, how that is supposed to work exactly?
By increasing ticket wait times exponentially until you outsource support to the lowest bidder or sell the company.
You set expectations up front. If a $5/year customer is bugging you nonstop and it's not your problem, offer a refund and ask if they'll move elsewhere at their convenience. Hell offer to buy them the service elsewhere if it's worth it enough for you to get rid of them. Then add a new policy for new customers limiting tickets based on numbers, purpose, severity, etc.
Personally I try to deal with them by treating them all as if they're my highest paying customer. Yes that's unsustainable at scale and that's why small businesses win in customer satisfaction.
If you advertise and don't supply it, it's you're own stupid fault. Not everyone has common sense, so you can't rely on your customers all having it.
spot on. Set expectations correctly and services that you're able to actually fulfil.
How about a business model like "no support linux hosting" They ignore silly support questions and they are proudly telling this on their homepage. http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/
I agree with you, but that doesn't entirely solve the problem I think. For example:
Customer signs up for $10/year shared hosting
Customer opens a flurry of tickets, demanding premium service and hand-holding
Provider says no, not what we do
More tickets.
Provider says no, not what we do
Repeat steps 4 and 5 as many times as you'd like
Customer storms off, opens threads on WHT, charges back, etc.
Even if you get to keep the $10, you've still had to deal with this.
It's easy for me to see that Le Chez Maison is a $100/plate restaurant and McDonald's is not, and if I go to McDonald's it's not reasonable for me to complain that they don't have filet mignon on the menu or that the mustard is not Gray Poupon. With hosting, it's hard because everyone claims to be one step from Google and it's hard for a consumer to differentiate.
If this happens to the provider once - every store in the world gets jerks sometimes. If it happens regularly, then I think maybe the provider should stop looking for customers on LET.
I'd heard somewhere that 20% of your customers cause 80% of your customer support, meaning the 'annoying customer' is unavoidable at any scale.
Real issues aside, and after a gentle stroking of their attention wanton hair, just give them it bluntly, they pay X and get Y and it's as simple as that. Shut down their reason for continuing to contact you. More often than not they'll just get on with using the service. Remember that your time is a real cost, so if they're going to continue yakking at you for no useful reason, they're not worth the hassle.
Yeah. It's called the 80/20 rule or the "Pareto Principle".
Every thread eventually circles back to @WSS it seems.
Cool name, let's check it out..
Nope.jpg
One of these days, someone should write a WHMCS module that gives users points based on what they pay... these points are deducted from your account whenever you ask a question to support about anything non-critical and solvable on their end. Service down? Seperate department that closes all tickets on non-emergencies.
Sure, it seems to apply to a lot of things, but also the ratio of regular customers and needy ones.
Though, I've had a few customers that spend a few grand a month and ask one or two questions a month, and 30 responses long tickets with guys who've spent 12 quid. I treat all customers the same but after a while you can see which ones are genuinely needing your input and which aren't... usually it comes in the form of asking for side perks like free advice or discounts... or their own lack of experience.
for me it's normal to prioritize clients that pay more, after all they keep the company running and expanses paid.
Let's not fool ourselves, there is nothing left on $2/month service. It can only be slightly profitable if the client opens 0 tickets unless, of course, in case of issues on our end.
I deal with many tickets daily.
Lots of pacience... Lots, lots of patience. There are both bad and great customers.
It's totally worth it if you enjoy doing ticket support.
I guess I need to clarify the obvious which is my own stupid fault. I do not advertise it. A lot of others do. Is that my fault?
I am asking a simple question that has nothing to do with me or anything I am necessarily doing or not doing.
You're right to note that it makes it difficult to compete not offering those promises, because those other people are delivering on it with services that cost pennies...
...for now while they still have under 150 customers and haven't graduated from college yet.
I wasn't talking about you personally, I was speaking in generalities.
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They'll scream but nobody will pay - copy/paste the same a few times, tickets gone.
I had a CrapNAT™ user who forgot to submit a ticket for renewal, and then it expired after 30 days... He was not happy.
Don't hate me because I'm beautiful..
OK, why then?
So offering no support linux hosting for $1/mo is...well, you only get 1 site so meh. But it's still lowend compared to one of the bigs.
Their NoSupportVPSHosting sister site offers 8c/2GB/100GB/500GB bw, which is interesting at $15/mo. Usually there'd be a lot more BW at that price, but often less disk and fewer shared cores.
They have very detailed pictures of the servers on their site which is pretty cool.
We usually do not discriminate between high and low paying customers. It is true that low paying ones need most support as even if small amount it matters to them ,however I am ok with that as I come from same background where money matters . People pay you their hard earned money,so I respect that and I try to deal with as humanly as possible as long as customers do not start abusing . I have worked with some companies who treat customers and employees as shit ,I am very much against that attitude .
That's the beauty of being a small business. Maintaining that, if your low paying customers grow significantly faster than high paying ones, will be difficult. If you choose to grow to a large size, that is. If you choose not to, it's sustainable.
The problem with scale when most customers pay little is:
You lose high paying customers because treating everyone equal means first come first serve, and the high paying clients are probably why you can afford to answer the tickets as fast as you can anyway, so you end up hurting the low paying ones by not working harder to keep the high paying ones. The high paying clients are less loyal if they feel like their money buys no priority, but they won't always tell you.
People inevitably think you care less when you answer tickets slower, and low paying customers do not fund staff in a way that scales at the same rate as customer growth.
Support strategy is hard at scale. When you're small it's so easy. Frankly, it makes staying small very attractive. It also makes using small companies attractive.
Well attitude of the owners matter too in some cases .I have seen some pretty big companies offering nice support than some so called popular small hosts with few thousand people .However yeah it is true that hard to handle when you get pretty big .
I am nearing filling a 3/4 cabinet with less than 10 tickets per day . This is the experience you get when working in this industry since 2012 and having being worked at close to 5 companies.
As long as you keep straight of what you provide and what you do not , we get less tickets until something breaks
>sighs, exaspirated< There are plenty of other reasons, just pick one!
Interesting... am I an annoying customer? Your discussion led me to see my ticket history. In it I found some pearls as these:
Dreamhost circa 2006
Dreamhost circa 2007
Dreamhost circa 2007
Dreamhost circa 2007
(Didn't quite remember the Dreamhost quality back in 2006...)
Ever wondered if YOU are a client from hell?
If you can't handle them then don't provide your plans at cheaper price and respect your customers instead of thinking that they are time killer, etc.
I am also low end provider but I love to quickly reply to query even If question is to long or to many question. Slow support damage their business so Improve your support system and try to reply them within 20 minute or less and don't think they are time killer, etc. (Be positive)
Unfortunately this doesnt test well with customers. We polled on a similar (but different) method.
We have toyed with having "Low End" (discounted) plans with a Medium priority ticket cap, and regular plans with a High Priority cap. Perhaps a few other minor restrictions as well (i.e to the SLA policy). User feedback was not positive...