One of the most satisfying things when you have toiled and sweated online is selling your products to those people eager to buy them. There is nothing quite like getting the notification emails from your payment processor of choice to tell you you’ve made a sale.
In fact, I’m such a sad person that when my membership sites first took off back in 2005, I made a rule in Outlook for all my Paypal payments from those sites to drop down in green. I used to love watching all those green emails dropping down 🙂
Selling something you’ve toiled over for days weeks or even months is one of the most satisfying feelings you can have, and I count myself very lucky to have had that feeling many times over the last few years.
One of the most important aspects of selling online is your after sales customer care, I can’t even begin to describe how important it is to look after your customers because a happy customer will trust you and will buy from you again. Looking after your customers is fundamental, and I can never understand why some vendors don’t seem to do it very well. I’ve been amazed sometimes at how lax some people can be when it comes to looking after their customers
We run a very robust help desk for all of our products, trying to answer any queries etc that may come up. We run it over a 24 hour period as well as the weekend. (You would be surprised at just how many big companies don’t work a 24 hour desk or weekends). Sometimes it may be a couple of hours or so before we can get to a customer query but one of us is always there at some point during the day whatever day it is.
But and this is a huge BUT, sometimes, just sometimes you have to take a step back from certain customers and say enough is enough…
We had a recent transaction of our EMP software and practically straight away we had an irate ticket on the desk from our customer (Lets call him Bob) about something. He could have hardly had time to download it never mind install his script.
Our desk staff were very nice to him and explained the error he had made, no thank you or anything was forthcoming, but fair enough he was probably busy.
He had problems installing the software so we had another unpleasant ticket from him. (He obviously hadn’t bothered to watch the install videos or read the manual). Once more my staff pleasantly steered him in the right direction. This carried on for several days, he constantly posted tickets with a nasty tone to them. (They were all user errors because it was obvious he still wasn’t reading the manual or watching the videos etc on how to use the script).
Then one day he went too far, He was having a genuine problem with something and our programmer explained to him he had a hosting issue, explaining what it was he had to email his host to correct. (They hadn’t updated something or other apparently). Bob wrote back calling him a liar and told him he didn’t know what he was talking about and some other really unpleasant stuff.
I’d watched with growing unease the tickets he’s been sending in. Until this point thy had only an unpleasant tone, but this was the point where I had to do something..
So I did…
I sacked Bob as a customer and I refunded his payment…
One of the things I would consider really important when you’re dealing with difficult customers is to realize when enough is enough because these people drain your soul and sap your spirit. They can also end up costing you a lot more in support desk assistance than they actually paid in the first place.
I know a lot of folks hate refunding, I don’t particularly care for it either, but I’d sooner do that than deal with people who will never be happy, and as I’m constantly pointing out to other marketer’s its a digital product. (Unless you’re dealing in physical stuff of course where the rules are different).
And one thing I won’t put up with (ever) is my staff being abused by customers.
One other thing I’d like to emphasize here, is you should never ever be abusive back, even though the urge to do so is strong. (Believe me I’ve been there).
In Bob’s case I took over the ticket and explained to him that as we were obviously not a good fit for him etc then I’d taken the decision to refund his payment. I did also explain that I wasn’t happy with his tone to my staff, (but I did it in a fairly nice way) 🙂
I even gave him the web addresses of our rivals so he could try them out (ahem) and wished him luck with his IM business.
Then after his refund came through I watched with great satisfaction his licence being turned off so he couldn’t use our software any more. (I love licensing software)…
So the point of this story…
Don’t get hung up with difficult unpleasant customers, because they take you away from doing the other important stuff of looking after those who genuinely need it.
BTW I’m not advocating ‘sacking’ customers who need a lot of assistance, (I’d never do that), just those who just wont listen to what you say and who are also abusive, because I’ve come to realize these people will never be happy with what you do.
Till next time
