
Fire your bad customers - grwthckrmstr
https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/fire-your-bad-customers
======
neilv
In the past, being an independent consultant for around a decade, I let 2-3
clients go.

One of those, letting the client go turned out to be a huge mistake, since the
reasons turned out to be a temporary blip. In so many words, the great
executive later returned, some things that were concerning/unacceptable while
the exec was away were presumably reversed, but I'd already moved on.

Another, they just had an unsalvagable massive mess of a code base that an
undergrad made, and they didn't appreciate how bad it was, and that it needed
more than incremental work.

Before and after the regretted cut-loose client, I also didn't take on at
least a few clients who I had misgivings about. Some of those were probably
due to once-bitten, twice-shy.

Some problems I've learned to avoid, and I'll phrase them here as positives
(I've found both the negative and positive examples):

* Clients who realize they need more than a low-end programmer. Like many people, I have a lot of experience working higher-end than that,

* Client respects you as an expert or competent professional. That doesn't mean they defer to you automatically. What you want to avoid are situations like someone key at the client thinking they always know better, on all topics. Which is a not-unusual phenomenon. One version to avoid is when they are the expert on all things, and they think they're only hiring worker drones to save time on things they know better on.

* Client is intelligent and constructive. If they're saying technical things that don't make sense, and when you attempt to discuss, to understand and possibly inform, you hit a brick wall, then you might have a lot of brick walls in your future if you take them on as a client.

* Client has enough money, is willing to spend it on you, and looks like they'll have enough money for a while. Complementary to this, I of course wouldn't take a contract like, say, someone self-funding a startup, and no matter what I did for them, it didn't look like they'd be viable.

* If client is a CS-ish professor (which I bump into probably more than most, since I have a fondness for some aspects/ideals of universities, and live in university neighborhoods)... Only take the client if you can find a situation close to that of a colleague of mine: works with a PI who respects him as both skilled and as a collaborator. It's not uncommon for a CS-ish professor to think they know more about practice than practitioners, and they get some (misleading, incestuous) validation from others in academia. I respect professors by default, and some are close friends, but egos and inaccurate perceptions about the world outside academia seem not-unusual. Also, universities are accustomed to cheap, captive labor (except for select higher-ups, and sometimes endowment hedge fund managers).

* Watch out for the casual oracle (I don't know whether there's an existing term?), and also be careful not to be the casual oracle. By which I mean a decision-maker has a friend or someone who they keep going to to check things you tell them, and this person overrules you. Normally, this would be fine, especially as a discussion, but what I'm talking about is like a rogue doctor, who diagnoses patients without ever having examined them, talked with a doctor who has, or even glanced at their ED chart, yet ends up overriding the actual doctors of the patients. I've seen this a few times firsthand (in tech, not with doctors), so it seems to be a thing, and I also had a friend once quit over it. If it's a thing, I don't know whether it's only an artifact of not respecting the person doing the work, or something else. A few times, I've also realized that I was being asked to be the casual oracle, and I tried to be humble and qualify, but now that I recognize this thing, I'll be even more careful.

~~~
koheripbal
This really applies to all relationships. Every relationship has a pros and
cons, and if the cons outweigh the pros = dump that person.

I have a filter on new employees such that if they cannot fill out the
application on the website, they don't get an interview. Same with customers -
I deliberately channel them to the website because if they cannot figure out
how to use our brainlessly easy website, I don't want to spend the next year
walking them through.

There is a multiplicative hidden cost working with uneducated/lazy people
people. It's like the locked doors theory of crime. The most criminal 0.1% of
society costs society a 100x increase in security costs.

The same is true for romantic relationships - some are just not worth it.

~~~
yourapostasy
> There is a multiplicative hidden cost working with uneducated/lazy people
> people. It's like the locked doors theory of crime. The most criminal 0.1%
> of society costs society a 100x increase in security costs.

This is probably a lesson that is endlessly learned by new junior consultants.
When new consultants get into consulting through the fluent practitioner route
(as opposed to the "warm body contract job shop" route), they tend to make the
common assumption everyone is as excited as they are about the field, and the
only difference between them and their clients' staff is time-on-keyboard, and
perhaps some perspective.

There is a distinct category of staff that the new consultant will encounter
who immediately glom onto the convenience of treating the consultant as a
personal Google service, with the added bonus of not even having to sift
through the search results and handed the answer. Kind of a value add when the
check-signing manager witnesses this happening first-hand; many appreciate
getting confirmation they bought the services of an expert.

However, the trap is the new consultant assumes the staff member will leverage
these answers to find their own new lessons to learn. Or even remember the
answer. This becomes a significant time sink, so different consultants develop
different ways with different clients to mitigate this anti-pattern. Nothing
to fire a client over (to bring us back to the original topic), but definitely
an issue you want to keep tactics to employ in your back pocket for.

~~~
sitkack
I would like to discuss this subthread at length, this specific pathology is
playing out at my current engagement right now.

For context, I have been in consulting roles for most of my career, probably
because of my proclivity to be "unsolicited advice guy". I see something amiss
and I tell people about it. My delivery has changed and matured over the
years, but I still cannot correct flaw.

An epiphany I had a couple months ago, and this is after 20+ years of this
work, is that consultants are primarily organizational psychologists. They
bring a lot to the project and the org, but it isn't the technical that takes
the highest position. And in the case of the repeat-help-desk-can't-fish
customer there are a lot of different issues at play. Some of the charitable
ones are

\- lack of confidence

\- risk of getting blamed

\- over worked, too much responsibility compared to the skills

\- unrealistic deadlines by their managers

\- personal issues prevent a lack of focus and inability to do deep work

If you deliver the n-th answer like you delivered the zeroth answer, they will
think you have an infinite capacity for taking their burden. There are signals
you can use to push back, explain how busy you are, frame you answer relative
to a previous answer, answer the question with 3 questions and some tasks that
if completed will solve their problem (Socratic help desk).

Consultants should make their customers and all of their customers look like
rock stars, but we shouldn't let folks within the org use your knowledge and
skills to make themselves look better. This particular pattern is damaging
because while to the rest of the org they look amazing, their ego erodes and
they keep coming back to the oracle for more answers and at some point they
are only a mindless conduit.

In the case of an employee who is using you as a 2nd brain, one technique is
do a pomo of the issue, give them mad props for the debugging, development,
patience, etc while outlining the problem and how it solved. Make a group
effort while giving them some praise but don't allow them to consistently take
center stage.

On the flip side, one can find the staff members how share knowledge within
the org, and synthesize new solutions from previous ones. These folks need to
be protected, cultivated and propped up, they will save projects and your ass
if handled with care.

~~~
yourapostasy
Great explication of some of the nuances encountered with this pathology. This
is one of many areas where the art of consulting (that is, sufficient
experience to start pattern-matching new clients' behaviors) steps into the
picture.

The delicate balance to effect here is employing the techniques you outlined,
against the deliverables and maintaining good working relationships with staff
you depend upon to deliver to you information you need to accomplish what you
were brought in for. Unless you correctly read your client organization and
staff who you will be interacting with, and correspondingly pad your
estimates, carrying out these techniques become mostly or all unbillable work.

The technique of doing a pomo works really well for issues above a certain
complexity level. Often I can get a manager to enthusiastically sign off on
incrementally adding to the engagement on a time and materials basis on top of
the outcome-based fee I bill for such knowledge transfers, typically as one or
a series of lunch and learns.

Below a complexity level (for example, "how do I enable tracing in <foo>?"),
and it rapidly becomes nonsensical, and I use a lightweight (to the
consultant) version of what you recommended. Depending upon the personalities
involved, and facilities available, I usually ask for the request be re-framed
as a ticket "so the entire team can learn now from the answer, and datamine
the knowledge base in the future", and I suggest to the manager that the
requester be officially tasked with documenting the answer into the team's
official documentation repository with an official documentation template,
that a project manager will then start chasing down. I also recommend someone
else on the team "QA" the documentation by performing the procedure as
documented.

The documentation doesn't have to be fancy, even a single paragraph suffices
in some cases, but usually there is a _lot_ of red tape involved. This
delivers genuine benefits from the leadership's perspective, and for genuine
"the organization didn't know how to do this", it does advance the
organization's capabilities. The bonus for the consultant is it puts you back
in the consulting seat, where you point towards how it is done in sufficient
detail so someone can put together the steps (you might call out one or more
particularly tricky steps, but usually just pointing in the right direction is
enough), but the person doing the asking becomes responsible for proving and
documenting the steps to their peers, project manager and manager. This cuts
down on the frivolous requests to pretty much trivial amounts in my personal
experience, without compromising on leadership's nor staff's desires.

~~~
sitkack
Great advice on forcing the documentation as both a gating function and an
optics advantage to management.

I have been trying to re-route RTFM queries to inside the org by putting in
support structures where there were previously none, as well as working on
some training sessions that are basically "how to avoid RTFM queries" but in a
respectful way.

------
StavrosK
I've had fun replying honestly to bad customers. I run a service where you pay
once for a lifetime upgrade, and it doesn't make much money so I don't care
very much about dissatisfying bad customers.

One of them emailed me with a subject line of "my account is broken! FIX
IT!!!" and no body, to which I replied "how rude, do you think I'm your
slave?". He replied in the same vein, saying that if I didn't fix it he'd go
to a competitor, to which I said "it's a one-time payment and you've already
paid me, if you leave you're just basically saving me time in support".

He replied a few hours later apologizing for his rudeness and detailing what
the problem was, which I helped him fix, but it was fun to see how much
customers expect to be able to walk all over customer service and how
surprised they are when you don't take their shit.

To be fair, 99% of support emails are very kind and polite.

~~~
katzgrau
Your pricing model is broken and it's bad for you and customers. Do yourself a
favor and put a limit on support after the upgrade and then offer an ongoing
maintenance package.

I used to have a similarly bad attitude when I had low metered pricing. Once I
insisted on monthly account minimums I could afford to hire a nice customer
service person and not be so touchy all of the time.

~~~
StavrosK
This is literally one instance in ten years. That's pretty far from "all the
time", which is a conclusion I don't even hint at anywhere. I'm pretty happy
to provide the service at this price point, and every customer is too.
Besides, I would call out this kind of entitled rudeness at any price point.

~~~
the_other
I quite often throw out the “raise your prices” viewpoint in casual
conversation, based on my time (12ish years) as a contractor. When I do it,
I’m aware it’s not always the best option, but I don’t have a catalog of
personal experience to draw on for more nuanced advice.

This was a nice example of when not to. Thanks.

~~~
StavrosK
My example is not completely applicable because it's not a business per se,
nor do I want to make it one, it's more of a "I made this for myself but you
can use it if you chip in to pay for costs". Even so, I recently raised the
price from $20/ever (where it was since 2008) to $50/ever.

The way I handle most support requests is to make the UI easy enough so that
people don't have that problem in the first place, though many still do,
partly because of the unorthodox "email token to log in" system I switched to
recently. Many people weren't used to that.

------
njsubedi
From the perspective of a mobile app/game developer, I’d say developers who
sell apps on the app stores aren’t so lucky. You need to respond, and resolve
issues of each and every customer, otherwise get bombarded with a bunch of
negative reviews from accounts of everyone they know. Just like the recent
fate of TikTok app, but in a smaller scale. One time a single customer nearly
took our business down by writing 1 star reviews every day for weeks about how
we fucked him over with a paid app (that was $4.99) and that we were scamming
because we didn’t fully refund him for the service he used for a month. The
review highlights would only show his reviews so download and sale dropped,
competitor ranked #1 from #2 .. and it was one hell of an experience.

One day that guy stopped rating our app, and things started getting better.
Yeah, it’s a bad idea to put the fate of your business in a single app, but we
were just starting out.

This happened because we kinda fired our one customer. From that day, everyone
who asks for a refund even after using up the services gets a refund. Feature
requests go to a voting arena; so far so good. We’re not sinking now.

~~~
metafunctor
This matches with what I've learned as well with digital B2C products. You
should fully refund with a very low bar. No questions asked, even.

Assume the customer has a point, even if you don't fully get what the point
is. If they are not happy for whatever reason, promptly give them their money
back, apologise for the bad experience, and move on.

Furthermore, your customer support should never be defensive; their job is not
to protect your company but really side with the customer. Early on, when
every dollar counts, it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to argue with
the customer to keep their money. Just don't do that, it will annoy the
customer and you'll have to refund them anyway.

Yes, some people will take advantage of this, especially with refunds. That's
the cost of doing B2C business, perhaps with digital products in particular
where it's hard to prove the customer “received value”.

When they say ”the customer is always right”, as cheesy as it sounds, they
have a point. And it's not that the customer is always technically correct,
but assuming that stance will be better for your business.

~~~
wjnc
Just as in mobile gaming you're mainly catering to whales, this kind of
customer service is catering to sharks (or snarks?). It's a bad equilibrium to
be in since bad customers do exist and the platforms act like they don't.
Wisdom of the crowds is in averages, not in catering to the bottom .1%.

I'm in old school insurance and we even have legitimised platforms to catch
cheaters, liers and those that would threaten our staff. They don't get
insurance anywhere after things like that. I would say that on average that
leads to better premiums and better customer service, having procedures to
remove the bottom .1% from service.

A transaction shouldn't be based on received value (ex post), but on perceived
value (ex ante). Two parties commit to a contract and follow through. We (EU)
have laws about how to deal with problems after a legal commitment is made
even for online. I think the US has less of that leading to the concept of (ex
post) service as being free returns, unlimited refunds etc. It makes business
harder, in a way. You can't guarantee happiness but you can guarantee
delivering your part of the deal. It's a different mindset based partly on
different legalities.

~~~
tome
> I'm in old school insurance and we even have legitimised platforms to catch
> cheaters, liers and those that would threaten our staff. They don't get
> insurance anywhere after things like that.

Interesting. Are you saying that insurance firms share info about bad
customers?

~~~
wjnc
In the Netherlands, after a customer acts with the intention to defraud and a
limited list of other abuses, yes. There are procedures in place for appeal
and one could go to the courts for appeal as well. It truly is the <.1%.
Health insurance is not in this scheme.

------
kenhwang
Alternatively, charge them appropriately. I billed at double rate with an one
hour minimum for unscheduled phone inquiries. Nothing makes you rich or stops
their misbehavior faster than sending a $200 bill for a 2-minute call that was
essentially "did you see my email?"

Special feature requests were tied to minimum spend contracts.

~~~
grwthckrmstr
I was afraid to try this, because as someone else pointed out, what if they
agree and now I'm stuck with a high-paying toxic customer. Yikes!

~~~
eitland
@200 an hour, billed by the hour and counting from the first minute they have
to be particularly toxic. Still I guess you should have your terms and
conditions carefully though out.

~~~
thomasfedb
Irritation factor is an important billing metric. I very rarely say no to a
job, I just price so that I'll be happy if they accept.

------
patman81
Once you decide to "fire a customer", it may not be easy to get thru that
process. It can be tricky if the cancellation started on the side of the
software provider.

We run an enterprise saas business and at one point decided we can't work with
a particular customer anymore. We informed the customer that we will terminate
his service and cancel all his outstanding (unpaid) invoices.

Soon after that, the customer started to take legal action against our
company. It was quite an ordeal for about 12 months. At least it helped us
improve our contracts and legal processes going forward.

However, since than we are careful to vet new potential customers _before_ we
offer our software. If we feel the software isn't a good fit, we will tell the
customer and work thru our concerns before signing a contract. Even if we may
lose some potential customers in the process, it builds a more healthy and
sustainable business.

"Avoid toxic customers." Is now part of our handbook.

~~~
csydas
This works if your business model allows you to be selective, but for many
companies (big and small) you don't get to choose your customers. Even worse,
a lot of times it's not fully bad customers, it's a bad customer attached to
an otherwise benign entity that refuses to acknowledge the behavior of the bad
customer.

This is exacerbated for big businesses because typically the sales team and
the product team are not working directly together except for POCs, and the
discussions that a Sales team has and a Product Team has are very different.
It's not even about technical competency most of the time from the Sales Team
(my experience is they usually know just about what they should for the role,
and smart Sales folk know when to stop and ask instead of making promises they
can't keep), but rather that typically who the Sales team talks with is not
the bad customer, but higher decision makers who just get a generalized
feedback from the actual bad customer within their company. The nit-picky and
vicious activities are abstracted out into some more generalized and calmer
statements when delivered to decision-makers/Sales, and it can be very
difficult to get any traction on such bad customers.

I deal with these situations exclusively and it's time consuming and
exhausting. Cheap legal threats aren't even the worst part (fun trick when you
get a compensation request, just ask for detailed documentation on how they
arrived at such a number; most times this is enough to shut down such requests
as the number is just something they've pulled out of the air because "it
sounded good" during a meeting), but instead that most of the time what you're
dealing with "family problems" from these customers, and these are problems
they just don't want to deal with personally.

Business is weird.

------
MattGaiser
A startup I know was basically killed by this (COVID was the main cause, but
this was a large straw that absorbed a ton of time just before the pandemic).

Over a month was spent caving to every inane request of this one customer and
the only reason they did it was because the customer was willing to pay $250
and they were the first non-institutional paying customer so they were
obsessed with getting it right.

5 figure a month contracts that were soon to start but paused due to the
pandemic went unserviced so that large parts of the product could be rewritten
to serve this one person as though they were the expert on what non
institutional customers wanted. And in the end they wanted nothing more than a
custom Craigslist type of ad, just with their own custom style and everything.

Could have spent that month protecting the large contracts.

~~~
grwthckrmstr
Ouch! That must have hurt. I totally get that when someone has 0 or only a
handful of customers, trying to service one that's showing interest (but being
demanding) feels like the natural thing to do.

But more often than not, the end outcome isn't favourable.

A friend of mine serviced an early user of his app during the early days with
free customisations. That same user came back asking for more custom features,
while being on the FREE plan, and threatened to write a 1 star review if they
didn't. Toxic.

~~~
MattGaiser
How did that all end with your friend? Was he able to fire him?

~~~
grwthckrmstr
Actually, I had this conversation 2 days ago and haven't heard back since.
That combined with my own experiences prompted me to write the blog post.

I'm going to follow up and report back.

Update: His reply - "Fired politely!"

------
timavr
Bad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA.

Also early there is not enough data to know who are the bad customers or who
customers who are having real problems, they all look the same.

The best way to deal with them is just to be honest: "This is not on our
roadmap, yes we know issues exists. Here is link to issues forum"

Public issues forum helps a lot, because if issue doesn't have upvotes or
comments, they can reason that chances for developers getting to it is nearly
zero.

Especially for anything below non pure enterprise 100k+ per customer, there is
no way team can address even 2% of issues if there is even hint of PMF.

Even for massive companies like Atlassian and Unity there are public feature
requests that have thousands of upvotes and they just don't do them because it
is not on the roadmap.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_Bad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA._

Reporting bugs doesn't make someone a bad customer.

~~~
mlyle
I don't think he's saying that.

But there's a certain kind of nitpicky person you can never make happy.

When your company is young and immature, there's still a decent concentration
of actionable feedback in the nitpicks. Eventually it gets harder to mine gems
out of it.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
If I was starting a company, I'd prefer to have at least a few nitpicky
customers. You might not solve all of their problems, but their over-
communication might highlight insightful decisions you could make, that would
otherwise be opaque from customers who don't ever talk to you. Emotional,
verbose feedback is better than no feedback.

~~~
dannyw
I think everyone is agreeing with each other. Early on these kind of customers
can be a benefit. Later on it may not be.

~~~
Beldin
The ability to quickly find bugs does not make you a bad customer - the way
you treat the company determines that.

I'm not at all convinced that tolerating bad behaviour towards your company is
ever a good strategy.

------
filmgirlcw
One of the important lessons I learned when I was building websites/doing
digital strategy consulting (and this was over a decade ago) was to charge
more. I was hesitant to do this because starting out, you want to attract
customers and you think being competitive and having low prices is the answer.
That can work to an extent, but what I found was that all of my clients who I
was charging low rates were demanding, needy, and wanted far more than they
were paying for. They were terrible. When I raised my rates, the clients I got
were much better. No more insane calls at all hours. No more requests for
stuff never in the initial SOW. No more threats of finding someone else even
cheaper to do it.

It’s often hard to know who is a bad customer at the beginning, but once you
figure it out, unless the customer is legitimately responsible for a massive
part of your business, I agree, fire them. And if the bad customer is
responsible for so much of your business you can’t fire them, start looking
for a replacement set of customers so that you can work to do that.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
The bottom end of any market is a cesspit, both for buyers and sellers. I
suspect it's the same at the top as well although I have little experience
there.

I've done quite a few projects for distribution companies, these are
intermediaries selling stuff on very low margins, basically warehouses with a
call centre. To survive they have to become obsessive over costs. They can't
turn that cost cutting mentality off even when they are buying services rather
than 10 million transistors or whatever they need. This makes them thoroughly
miserable places to work. Amazon is an example but on a massive scale.

~~~
francescopnpn
I agree. But amazon has AWS too which is high-end.

I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the
highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple,
Tesla, Gulfstream.

One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed
such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions)

~~~
Silhouette
_One exception is if your business accepts payments which can 't be reversed_

I do sometimes wonder how much global loss in economic productivity is caused
by the various payment methods that allow customers to retrospectively reverse
purchases or payments with a high or certain likelihood of taking their money
back and possibly also costing the merchant a fee, whether or not the customer
has any legitimate basis for doing so.

Even with an extremely low chargeback rate, the amount of hassle the
occasional chargeback does cause to one of my little businesses is wildly
disproportionate. We are generally very keen on looking after our customers
and in practice we tend to refund liberally in cases where for example there
seems to have been a genuine misunderstanding on the customer's part, even if
legally we have no obligation to do so. Consequently, we have a generally very
positive reputation, and sometimes even people who didn't find our product was
right for them turn out to be good ambassadors. I would gladly decline the
probably tiny number of customers who wouldn't buy our stuff without the
option to make us give their money back involuntarily in exchange for the
certainty we would get, and I don't think our reputation would suffer in the
slightest for it.

I can only imagine how annoying this sort of issue must be at a much larger
scale, like running a fashion store in the current circumstances where most
sales are online, and then encountering Rita Returner who wants to buy five
new dresses every month but then always returns four of them (one or two now
slightly marked and not able to be sold as new) because the law says she can
and there's no way to prove she caused the marks. A friend-of-a-friend
apparently saw a _huge_ cost to their business from a situation not unlike
this in recent months.

------
neya
I follow a different strategy. I took over a migration for a multi-million
visitor news portal. The person who handed the site over to me architected it
so poorly and didn't really share the full details and as a result the
migration blew and lead to downtime of about 20 minutes. The client hated me
for that. Over the course of the next 3 months, I went over the board to win
them back, provided them WhatsApp support and made sure things are re-
architected to be more cost efficient and stable. Since then, they've been
able to handle 10x the traffic since my engagement with them for the same flat
cost. Their competitors are paying easily 5-6x the cost in 1000s of dollars
per month. A few weeks ago, the client even offered me to become a CTO in
their company. Obviously, as a consultant I value loyalty and so I politely
declined. I even handle all their technology side of things, short of being an
official CTO. It's one of my greatest success stories and at the same time, it
helped me understand that behind all those angry calls, texts, etc. is a
frustrated PERSON who needs just emotional confrontation. It's not possible to
do this at scale, but, if you only have 1 or 2 bad apples, you can use them to
your advantage to gather feedback to improve your product or service.

From the author's note, if I paid for a lifetime service, it doesn't mean
you're doing me a favor. I'm simply paying what you told me your service is
worth. And if you treat me bad because I asked you to fix your broken stuff,
that's just so unprofessional. If I asked you for more stuff than what the
original product's scope is, you can simply let me know your consulting rates
and that is almost like a small investor paying you money to build a feature
for your product that's probably useful for other customers as well.

~~~
alchemism
> you can simply let me know your consulting rates and that is almost like a
> small investor paying you money to build a feature for your product that's
> probably useful for other customers as well.

This defense against attempts at subordination is sensible and professional,
but I think it is far from common thinking, in my opinion, among the non-
entrepreneurial types that go into Engineering or CS. It is understanding
gained for them only after decades of painful experience - if at all.

------
speleding
Telling a bad customer they are sucking up too much support time may make them
even angrier. In our support system we have a little flag for such customers
(we use it rarely): instead of telling them outright they are too needy we
wait a day before replying to them.

~~~
epx
Exponential back off, use this technique all the time

------
drchiu
I’ve used this trick in the past. More than a few times the bad customer tries
to quickly do a 180 and be superficially apologetic to prolong the
relationship. Unfortunately, behaving in this way, at least in their minds,
represents an effective strategy for getting what they want. I’d be curious to
hear what others have done in these cases? Raise prices even more? Refer to
competitors?

~~~
filmgirlcw
Raising prices on the customer can sometimes be a passive aggressive way out —
you’re trying to force them to leave, but the downside is some people will pay
and continue to be toxic and now you’re stuck with a high paying toxic
customer; that’s the nightmare, a customer who sucks but brings in too much
money to shitcan. I’d be in favor of a referral.

I’m a direct person, so I might say something to someone like, “I recognize
that you might think that you need to do [x-behavior] in order to get
attention and support; you have probably had to do that in the past to get
service. I need you to understand that this won’t be successful in our working
relationship and that my business will not be beholden to [x,y,z]. If we are
to continue working together, we need to have very clear communication about
what services are in and out of scope that we can both agree to. If we can do
that, I’m happy to keep working with you and will do my best to support your
needs. If we can’t, I’m happy to refer you to some places that might be a
better fit.”

~~~
grwthckrmstr
"but the downside is some people will pay and continue to be toxic and now
you’re stuck with a high paying toxic customer"

I totally hear you and this fear stopped us from charging extra from a toxic
customer. "What if they said yes?"

~~~
loosescrews
I think the answer is that your number wasn't high enough. The number should
be such that you are ok with them saying yes regardless of how unlikely that
may be.

~~~
grwthckrmstr
Got it, that makes sense. So high that if they say yes, I should be happy to
do the service for that $$

------
gitgud
A _" bad customer"_ is generally just a client who annoys you... in many cases
it's a misunderstanding of how easy things are, or how much effort you're
going to for them.

Simply conveying the effort and time you're expending for them (very
politely), helps them appreciate your business and temper their
expectations...

~~~
hhas01
“A "bad customer" is generally just a client who annoys you”

Nonsense. A bad customer is one that costs your company more to service than
it earns back in revenue. It’s simple arithmetic.

Maybe they don’t bother to pay their bills. Maybe they run you ragged with
endless change requests. Maybe they repeatedly start new projects then, just
as you’ve done all the prep work, put them “on hold”. Maybe they string you
along with promises of “big projects” coming down the pipeline that never
actually arrive. Whatever it is, every hour you sink on them is an hour not
spent on a customer that is profitable.

The article may be thin, but it’s absolutely right: get rid of those assholes
ASAP, and then fix your own damn processes so you don’t get screwed again.
Otherwise they’ll drag you down and drain your business for you.

~~~
hhas01
I find it slightly amusing that somebody downvoted this, considering I speak
from hard-learned experience here.

------
nabla9
These articles are like women's magazine articles for entrepreneurs. No
substance. Just a simple story and obvious suggestion from some influencer. No
real substance.

How is this top in HN?

~~~
neilv
I think I know what you mean, that, historically, there's been a stereotype of
"women's magazines", and you were using it as a familiar illustration. I
propose that we figure out different illustrations.

We can see similar, if less-recognized, patterns in many publications labeled
as for "men", "lifetyle", "health", "technology", "news", etc.

We've been calling them "women's magazines" so long, and I assume that, before
I was born, society let magazine publishers frame how we call and think of the
magazine, and its implied assertions about women.

Today, with publishing opened up more, and even literal children posturing as
broadcast "influencers", that some of the dynamics of publisher as often
posturer, manipulator, and exploiter are more transparent to us.

I don't know how to solve this, and it seems to be many different problems.
But I'm thinking that one thing we can do about it (and certainly this is far
from a novel idea, including in this particular space), is to reject
manipulative terms and labels that self-interested parties try to force on us.

~~~
nabla9
I think 'lifestyle magazine' would have been better but It didn't come to my
mind.

------
hpcjoe
I've had terrible customers when I ran my old company. I tried to ignore their
behavior and focus upon being a worthwhile group for them to deal with.

They tended to share a number of features.

1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which
not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources,
they never had any intent to work with you on.

2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving
problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working
together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free
consulting.

3) POCs on your kit, demonstrating your performance and cost superiority to
other solutions, with again, promises of if the POC went well, they would
purchase from you. They refused to sign a contract indicating this. And later
the bought very expensive gear from a competitor (about 5x our price) which
purportedly did the same thing (it didn't) at the same performance (it
didn't). Later reaching out to us to ask us to help re-engineer their
purchased solution (we didn't).

4) RFPs that you responded to, and according to the non-purchasing folks, you
dominated and won. Later changed by the purchasing people. In one case, a
university called me up on my vacation asking me to teach our competitors how
to do what we did. Because they didn't want to buy our solution from us. But
they wanted our solution.

Fire your bad customers. In the case of the university, we simply stopped
responding them them after they pulled that crap. I'd get occasional
complaints from them and others that they needed me to respond to RFPs so they
could get their minimum of 3 offers to compare.

We had a non-US government purchasing entity literally change a contract on us
because they could, and told us they could, without us agreeing to it.

Every single negative interaction wound up being represented in our T&Cs.
After a while, some of the larger groups we dealt with complained about our
T&Cs. Which weren't one sided, but they were fair to both parties. I am
thankful that this provided signals of problematic customers. I'd sit down
with the entities lawyers and explain every single clause and why it was
there. I helped them understand what were lines what was non-negotiable.

Most reasonable entities adapted. The unreasonable ones would insist upon
their own terms, which were tremendously risky for us.

Almost 4 years since the company was killed, and it's getting a bit easier to
write and talk about this.

~~~
acwan93
>1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which
not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources,
they never had any intent to work with you on.

I've heard this too many times from our existing customers too. This sounds
like the "do it for exposure!" line of reasoning for artists.

>2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving
problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working
together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free
consulting.

We had this one customer who always called into our support line (and for some
reason got ahold of my personal cell!), and every call ended up being a 2
hour-long consulting session on how to get his business set up for e-commerce
and his business strategy. He's went through lots of arrogant
Wordpress/website developers that I couldn't stand working with, and still
hasn't had a site up after two years.

I was so relieved when he decided not to renew his service contact.

------
tlogan
I learned that there are two types of bad customers:

\- rude customers

\- customers which are not market/product fit

For rude customers, please give them benefit of the doubt: maybe they are just
in a bad mood that day. Your support team needs to understand that their job
is to help customers to achieve their goal (not to talk about bugs). If you
get a multiple rude answers after you try to help them, just cut them (refund
and ban). Do not worry about twitter and social media things: only 3% of world
population reads it. Do not worry if that customer thinks they are vip (like
CEO of some random ‘ycombinator’ company). The successful people are amazingly
polite.

For bad market/product fit, you need to explain how your product does not fit.
Sometimes it is mistake of your sales giving them impression that you can do
certain things. This is a hard problem.

In short, your customers will eventually define your company: in same way as
in bar/restaurant business customers eventually define type of a
bar/restaurant.

------
reillyse
Maybe I’m just showing my age but this is a rehash of a very old idea. I’m
pretty sure it’s in the 4 hour work week, which while largely a fantasy still
had some decent ideas.

------
P4wl0w
This is some serious and good advice for doing business and also managing
personal relationships.

Do not fear to say 'No!' and do not try to be everyone's darling.

I had to learn this the hard way because of exactly the same eagerness to do
business and take up on all opportunities.

My advice is to regularly reflect on your (business) relationships and
evaluate them (good, ok, bad) and sort out everyone who just gives you more
pain than value.

Of course 'value' in business is not only profit but also a good relationship
to your customer and wanting to do the job rather than wanting to do another
one. In personal life 'value' can be that someone accepts you as you are
and/or tells you their honest opinion even if you do not like what you hear.

You will have to define your own meaning of 'value' to evaluate these
relationships.

------
garyclarke27
When I had an ERP & CRM Reseller business, most customers were reasonable but
a significant few were bullies. I found the best way to deal with them is to
be tough back, to say no to unreasonable requests, to charge even more than to
other customers and remind them that they are always free to go elsewhere, I
had several screaming swearing calls as a result, but the strange thing is,
they rarely left and they paid in full.

------
francescopnpn
I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the
highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple,
Tesla, Gulfstream. One exception is if your business accepts payments which
can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware
subscriptions). The bottom of any market is shit.

------
aniijbod
I am deeply concerned when I hear the phrase in the title. Good customers are
a unit test our professionalism, our entrepreneurial capabilities as founders
and the effectiveness of the processes we implement, whereas bad customers are
merely a test our humanity. Ultimately, we know which of those two tests we
least want to fail.

------
katzgrau
Explain very nicely how you can achieve what your bad customer would like for
fee or upgraded plan. In fact, tell them that you'd love to do it but you
would need to direct new resources toward that effort.

Make sure that fee is a healthy one that will either make them go away or make
the effort worth it for you.

Win/win.

------
peter_d_sherman
>"A friend of mine serviced an early user of his app during the early days
with free customisations. That same user came back asking for more custom
features, while being on the FREE plan, and threatened to write a 1 star
review if they didn't."

Reminds me of Aesop's _" Please all and you please none" _ moral (but applied
in a modern-day context to a customer base):

[https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/648/the-man-
the-...](https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/648/the-man-the-boy-and-
the-donkey/)

------
takinola
My worst customers pay the highest rates. I continually increase the bill
until an equilibrium is reached between the aggravation they cause and the
happiness from my increased profits.

------
ropable
Internal IT support for a government agency here: there are times when I wish
I could "fire" some customers, but it's not really possible. On the other
hand, being part of the same organisation means that I can be (and have been)
quite free with communication to the effect of: "That email tone is not
appropriate. We are colleagues in the same organisation with our own set of
priorities and demands, and we require to be treated with the same respect as
you would."

------
shrimpx
This article implies that you should fire customers who are bad as in
demanding, annoying, toxic, high maintenance. But I don’t think it’s so
straightforward. If the customer is faang and they pay a multimillion
recurring contract, this guy will most likely swallow his discomforts and keep
serving. That customer is not so “bad.”

So the title should really be “get rid of customers who are bad for the
business,” which is self evident.

~~~
xupybd
I think a better way to word this would be to assess if you are happy with the
deal you are getting from your customers.

If you are willing to work like crazy to keep someone happy for whatever
reason go for it but it might be that you are putting out a fire that is not
worth putting out. Weigh up the opportunity cost and see what you want to do
then.

~~~
scollet
Yes, and an entity that is not diametrically opposed to the needs of your
other customers.

------
tchock23
I think it was Seth Godin who coined the term, ‘Choose your customers, choose
your life.’ It has stuck with me as good advice to follow since then...

------
kerryoco
If you have the "nice guy" problem like I did, my rule of thumb is: phrase
things in terms of your personal needs.

\- "I do not have the time to do XYZ, sorry"

\- "It would cost me too much to do XYZ, sorry"

\- "This framework does not support XYZ, sorry"

These are conversation stoppers. As opposed to:

\- "I think this goes beyond the scope of our agreement"

\- "What you are asking is very difficult"

------
walrus01
ISP perspective: _Always_ have an ironclad definition in your service
contracts and terms of service where the demarcation point is between your CPE
at a customer's premises, and their LAN. Problems on one side of that demarc
are your problem. Problems on the other side are _not_.

------
davidtranjs
Some customers are rude because they dont understand much about software
development. If they can listen and learning and have money to pay for you
then you can Try continue working with then

------
szundi
Very good advice.

However it is very easy for your employees to misinterpret outraged customer
behaviour after firing some of the bad ones. When they think it is a bad
customer, they always handle them well, communicate professionally and nicely,
and THEN they come to YOU that YOU DECIDE and do something about it. Not them.
These occasions are perfect to show them how to distinguish between relevant
outrage and a bad client who has a tantrum. If you miss this, your guys can
become demotivated by mistake.

------
hn_check
These "fire the bad customers" blog entries regurgitate on here with
regularity, and it reads like a fan fiction more than an actual description of
events.

Further some of the examples are terrible. If, for instance, you've made
multiple product changes for a free customer, the problem isn't that the free
customer exists, it's that you didn't have any check early on against doing
that.

"Can you change this for me?" "No." Alternately, "Sure, that would be $2750 up
front"

Etc.

Customers bothering you on WhatsApp? Again, maybe the customer isn't the
problem...

------
monadic2
Man if only you could become a capitalist through some other means than being
a capitalist to begin with.

~~~
grwthckrmstr
Don't hate the player hate the game :D

