Is caring about your customer actually killing your business? | Hacker News Reader

Is caring about your customer actually killing your business?

ninjodo.com

37 pointsmustafabisic117 comments

TL;DR No. Caring about your customer isn't killing your business. Actions Steps are: 1. Stay Focused 2. use online tools like live chat and a CRM 3. Create an internal and external FAQ thing.

The "Actually" in the title should have been enough of a red of flag to not click. I did anyway. The article is long. 3x longer than needed I think and wasting people's time will drive them away. Article also includes a recommendation to read some Gary Vaynerchuk book. That says all you need I think, but your mileage may actually vary.

The CRM system (used well) is crucial for that. How long are you spending on average doing CS work? Are some customers more expensive to service than others? Are you charging enough (patio11 says no) to cover the costs of customer service? If you're not then no amount of growth will help. If you have companies requiring Enterprise level support and you're charging them Startup prices then something needs to change.

There's also a level of intellectual honesty required about how mature your product is. You may be spending ages dealing with some customers because they aren't early adopters and your product isn't yet ready for their needs.

Don't worry too much about making your customer happy - worry about keeping their customer happy. Your customers have customers - it's customers all the way down. Why is your customer doing business with you - what product or service are they reselling to their customer?

* Maybe they leverage your SMS app to send update notifications, telling their customers about a hot sale.

* Maybe they use your IaaS to host their real-estate website platform, letting their customers track who's looking at their agents' houses.

* Maybe they use your hand-picked tomatoes in their restaurant's home-made tomato sauce.

However they rework your product, they're depending on you to deliver consistent quality on-time, so they can continuously deliver this to their customer. If they can't provide this to their customer, the customer will find some other source. (Or else that customer's customer will find a new source.) Your customer won't be a customer for long, if they lose their customers. Especially not if your poor product (or poor delivery/uptime, or poor presentation/reseller experience) drove their customers away.

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This blog article was troublesome to read. It was very slow to load, slow enough that I found the Google Cache before it loaded: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Gmcavd...

Secondly, after about a paragrah, a large splash popped up and blocked the article. Adblocking this element left the page without scrolling capabilities, but disabling all scripts from ninjodo.com loaded a completely usable page that loaded quickly.

Finally, the writing felt rambling, and the story (also found on the wall of a Jimmy John's near you) didn't seem much related to the thesis.

I read a book over the holidays (The Attackers Advantage by Ram Charan) that made a similar point for how businesses can handle structural uncertainty in the market. The analogy that he used was Blackberry failing to anticipate the threat the iPhone was to their business. They focused on creating a solution that was perfect for an IT department who were purchasing the phones, not realising that their customers customers (the executives) wanted other features (media support, etc), and would force their IT department to adapt. If Blackberry had paid attention to what the executives wanted, they might still be around.

> Don't worry too much about making your customer happy - worry about keeping their customer happy.

How does this logic work for a consumer product?

The consumer's spouse, children, and boss number among their customers.

The sale is just the beginning of the relationship.

  Don't worry too much about making your customer happy - worry about keeping their customer happy.

Or to generalize: make your customer successful and help them look good in their market.

Large businesses instantly answer when I have a question? Is this a joke? Maybe some do but most do not. Worse even, most have office hours and weekends meaning that if you ask your question at the wrong time, there is a chance you wait 3 days. Most big corps are ghastly in that respect. And most answers, even from real sales and support humans are canned responses. While small companies I work with are on chat and mail always. Not sure if this differs by region but this does not reflect reality at all for me.

Edit: anecdotal of this which made me snicker; as a gold tier member I asked a question on the British Airways website. They say it will be answered in about 24 hours. It took a month. When I called and asked why, they said, we are sorry but we are very busy. Thanks guys. And that was not the first time but the most extreme.

>It seems that we’ll soon enter into a cycle where small players dominate.. And now is the time to prepare yourself for that.

Disagree with this wholeheartedly. The big players are dominating more and more with the resources and most importantly data being sucked up by all of them.

They have the cash, reach, talent and now - different from previous times - the flexibility to pivot and change reasonably quickly. Not as quickly as a tiny company granted, but quick enough that when they see a sea change they can adapt to it, either through acquisition or by leveraging their data to enter and dominate a market they weren't previously in.

This seems to be a pretty badly written infomercial.

Large text + overly verbose + two sentence paragraphs + huge images = a scroll bar so tiny, I realize I need to get back to work

No. But reading articles like this will.

There are definitely customers that are more expensive to keep than they are worth. I don't understand the calculus sometimes... Why are we burning 100 hours of developer time for a $5000 sale? There's not a ton of upside, and you can usually tell in the first meeting when a customer is going to be that kind of a pain in the ass.

That giant passive-aggressive pop-up on page open "Do you want to build a 6-Figure Business? [NO] I'm happy working until midnight for peanuts" was enough to stop me from reading, and negated the premise of the article.

Caring about your readers might be helpful. When you open this page and after a few seconds you get this intrusive overlay ad for a 6 figure business!1!! Now!1!! you tell me that showing me the article content isn't your focus.

To save everyone a click and having to slog through that atrociously-long article: no, it's not. Betteridge's law of headlines in action, folks.

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