if I ever treat you like this, please stop spending your money with us

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Jun 24, 2007

Comments (0)

If I ever say anything to you, my client, like this company owner said to me, his customer, then please stop doing business with InetSolution. If I start spewing forth garbage like this, then I've decided that I no longer care to impress you, nor do I have any desire to be the best in my industry. If I talk to you like this, then I've forgotten that I'm in a service industry and that my success depends on how well I serve you. If you tell me how I can better serve you, and I return the favor by insulting you, then please understand that, according to the A**hole Rating Self Exam, I'm just being a short-sighted a**hole and I no longer deserve your respect or business.

We've been using a new e-commerce application, ASPDNSF, for the past year. One of the easiest methods to receive support is through their community support forums. Lately, I, and other customers, have noticed that the forum moderators have been deleting and/or altering useful posts. I discovered the deletions when I tried to access several threads that I'd bookmarked since they contained solutions to bugs in the software.

Last week, a customer whose forum name is Nxpage, posted to the forum asking why many of the posts he's written and/or bookmarked have disappeared from the forum. ASPDNSF staff responded saying that they'd been doing "spring cleaning" and deleted threads that they felt were no longer useful. A few days later, ASPDNSF deleted this thread.

I was not surprised that ASPDNSF staff deleted the thread. Maybe they thought it would be funny to delete a thread discussing the deletion of threads? I wanted to know the real reason.

Today, I posted to the forum to ask why. Here is the response (my forum ID is Jasolution; the owner of ASPDNSF's forum ID is AspDotNetStoreFront):

Click to read the form response. Hurry, it will probably be deleted soon.

All I could do was shake my head in disappointment. Why work so hard to build a fantastic product, but then destroy the customer experience by treating them rudely? And if the owner treats customers like this, is it acceptable for all employees in the company to do the same?

While I felt I was wasting my time, I did send this final response through a private message to the ASPDNSF owner:

Robert,

Many of your public responses confuse and downright disappoint me. If your customers are taking time to share ideas with you to help you improve their experience using your product & services, why do you become defensive and lash out at us?

Rather than piss off your customers with your rude comments, perhaps you'd gain more in the long run, both financially and in customer loyalty, if you empathised, respected and worked with your customers.

Many of us who "whine" are the same customers who help you find and fix bugs in your software, software that WE'VE paid YOU for. Not only do we perform free "beta" testing for you, but we also often contribute source code fixes directly to your support team that you integrate into your products.

Do you really see no value in having a customer base that contributes in that manner to help you improve your product?

Robert, you can do better than this. If not, then it might be better to focus your time and efforts on writing code and let people with well-honed "people skills", like your VP of Customer Service, Dan, interact with your customers in the public forum.

I want to enjoy doing business with ASPDNSF. I want to continue to contribute to the growth of the product and the user community. What do you want?

Jason