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.
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.
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.
This is consistent with when I practiced medicine. No matter how hard you try, there’s always some percentage of people who try to take advantage of the system in what would publicly be considered inappropriate. Credit rating and systems such as the ones you described seem to be born out of the need to filter them out.
> 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?
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.
It's really weird how it's the total opposite for call centers for ISP/Cable companies. The job of the operator is not to solve your problem but to keep you as a client.
I rephrase it: the first and main goal of the support person is to keep you as a client, not to solve your problem.
I learned that when I applied for such a job, was given half an hour of sitting next to a support person and listening in to conversations between customers and that support person.
Then I got a 5 minutes interview where I was asked what I thought was the purpose and first objective of the job I was applying to: "Before passing the door I'd have said to solve customer's problems but now I can see it's more like... 90% is to keep the customers from leaving, 10% solve the problems. It doesn't matter if the problem gets solved.". The recruiter/head of service and my eyes met and we instantly both agree it wasn't a place for me ^^.
You were lucky. CS is hell. Inverse your findings: "How many customers actually want their problem solved?". You'd be very surprised, it's not many.
I did CS for networking hardware. Very easy to troubleshoot, plus I have all Cisco Certs. I could tell immediately what was wrong, within seconds of the call. Still you needed to dance around with the (angry) customer for 6-20 minutes, sometimes hours. Yes, hours. It was company policy to never hang up. Bad policy. That got them very high employee churn and costs.
It was torture when all you want to do is to just solve the problem. It's way more than that.
Surely if the customer is prepared to go to the trouble of calling you up about their problem they're likely to leave if you don't solve it? At least unless you have a monopoly?
It's not quite that drastic. Anywhere I lived I had at least two, often three options. But switching, especially if you have physical wiring and figured it out and working the way you want, is a hassle, so I would not do it lightly. My 2c.
There at most 2 wired internet options at every address I’ve seen. You have wired cable internet via coaxial from TV company, and fiber to the home from the telephone company, if you’re lucky (a very small percent of homes have this option). Most people just have the option of cable internet from TV company.
And wired DSL with 3Mbps from phone company doesn’t count as broadband internet, in my opinion.
I've generally had two choices: 5-12Mbps DSL or cable. A couple times I was able to get Google Fiber, but I'm sure you know how limited the availability of that is.
There aren't a lot of ISP/cable companies around and it can takes weeks and fees (for breaking contract) before moving to a clone of that company (and most likely suffer downtimes during that time).
I am really looking forward to StarLink. Even if it is expensive many ISPs outside the cities that are now just monopolies will find they will have to improve customer service.
Very true. It's also a golden opportunity of improving your product IMHO.
I got a very nasty review and had a hard time understanding how this user had such a bad experience - my app cannot be doing this, there's no such use case. I was sure that the user is writing this in bad faith but I apologised anyway.
Turns out, if a user follows a specific path they can get into a confusing situation that can be misinterpreted as App trying to force them do something that they don't want to do. The unhappy user had a very valid point despite the fact that it took me a month to understand the situation.
As a developer, and a user, I strongly agree that you should never ever argue with your users. Most of the times the reason for a pissed of user is a bug or miss-communication that you failed to identify.
In the case of mobile apps, you can’t refund the customer. You have to send them instructions on how to request a refund through the App Store.
Marco Arment - the author of Overcast a popular podcast app for iOS - has said repeatedly that if he could just offer refunds instead of dealing with an irate customer he would.
I think this is especially relevant in this case because this customer spent so much time and effort giving bad reviews that it seems like they must have genuinely felt that they had been screwed over, rather than being someone trying one on like your example of people returning a brick for a refund. Depending how you/they value their time, they probably spent more than that $4.99 posting those reviews. (Certainly, there are times when I would happily have spent $20 of my own money if meant $5 got taken from some business I felt had treated me badly.)
I sell a physical product, and this is my policy as well. I don't really care if I get the product back. I've learned that most customers calm down greatly, once they know two things:
1. They're interacting with a real person
2. They didn't just dump their money into a black hole
So I always start with empathy and an offer to refund their cost, and then proceed with the troubleshooting. Most of the time, it's something like, oops I put a dead battery in, or set it up wrong.
Refunds are part of the cost of doing business. I have an extremely high quality standard, to make sure those refunds are quite rare.
A person who used to blog about the online junk business said that the only reasonable policy is: Refund instantly, and ban the customer forever.
> Look, amazon offers refunds when people send back a brick instead of a computer and jeff bezos is rich enough to compete in the space race 2.0
I don’t do this. Not because I am a good person with morals but because I’m scared of being banned from Amazon.com
Amazon.com can easily track what items I looked at and what items I place on my cart. What’s to stop them from tracking what items I return?
I have a friend who returns everything when he buys something new, once every year or two, for a full refund. He'll literally buy a phone, use it for a year, then claim it has a dead pixel, send it back for a refund and buy a new phone.
He hasn't been banned yet, though I kind of hope he does.
In my view it hurts the suppliers who are trying to do business through Amazon. It also hurts other customers, since it reinforces the idea that you can ship stuff with unknown or intermittent quality, and let the return process serve as your quality control.
Broadly, US customer service return policies, despite what we hear, is superlative compared to most of the rest of the world [1]. If you travel a lot, the kind of return policies Americans broadly enjoy are pretty much non-existent outside the US, due to a relatively unique history of retail and general trust.
Culture is in general becoming a less pleasant, asshole-take-all experience because your "friend" embodies how trust and social fabric is corroded away. Not by big, monolithic, evil entities people like to rant upon here, but by everyday people like him making poor choices.
It might not be trust or customer service... it might be that americans have rights afforded to them via credit card laws. You can initiate a chargeback against the vendor and get your money back.
And for fraud... in the US you can lose max $50 to a credit card fraud incident ($500 if you are really negligent) by law.
So I think americans enjoy protections not available in other parts of the world.
I actually think this makes good sense. It eliminates the need for people "to take things into their own hands", or be overly cautious, so spending is increased.
I think it was matt ridley's book the rational optimist (?) that said that trust correlates with trade.
Monetary systems are (very poorly designed, highly lossy) attempts to quantify trust in many dimensional axes. Corrode trust, then the cost of trade goes up.
When I notice decisions made by people like what your friend does, if talking about it doesn't produce a change in choices, I instantly distance myself from them and then gradually cut them out of my life. Ethics is what you do when you think no one is looking on. Your mileage may vary, but personally, I have too little time in my life to spend on people who I have to worry about whether they will screw me over if the situation is just right. The cognitive load is not worth it.
App markets (and so many other rating services) are often so dominated by fake 5-star and toxic 1-star reviews, that I think any rating system needs to take the credibility of the reviewer into account.
Any account that only gives 1 or 5 star reviews, should probably have the value of those reviews reduced. A new account created only to give an extreme review of one product, is probably not too credible. Established accounts that give varied and nuanced reviews are more useful and more valuable.
These considerations should go into the calculation of the final rating, as well as which reviews are featured. That way, I think you can discourage fake or toxic reviews and reduce their impact, and focus more on honest reviews.
Amazon does do this now I believe. I've definitely seen products with mostly 5* reviews that have an overall score of like 3*. There's some vague explanation in their help system but they don't go into details unfortunately (for obvious reasons).
This wiper fluid is known to cause expensive failures for rain wiper fluid sensors but it has a cheerful 4.6/5 aggregate rating, despite the numerous 1 star reviews saying the product broke their car.
Sadly that can be gamed too. The fake account can give 2-4 star reviews to randomly selected apps in an attempt to not have it's targeted review devalued.
But it would be useful for normal accounts. Some people are just super-critical of everything. A 1 star review from such a person shouldn't count for as much. Same thing on the other side with people who only give 5-star reviews.
That sounds horrible, and I can relate. Shopify store owners who are bad customers can also hold you hostage by posting a 1 star review (unless you meet their demands).
Like you highlighted, it's even worse on mobile app stores as it's easy for them to get their friends to leave bad ratings.
Great that you survived and grew out stronger from the experience :)
Ranting on forums is far less effective and satisfying to the ranter because it's not boiled down to a 1-star rating and because it's easy to recognize a rant as such. So it's less attractive to begin with.
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.