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Comment by drchiu | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.”

> 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.

Raising prices should not be a passive-aggressive move. It should be to a price sufficient to offset the downside the customer brings (perhaps by hiring dedicated staff to deal with them), not to scare them off (it may have the latter effect, which is okay, but that's not the goal.)

If you aren't happy with them saying yes at the price you've set, you've set it to low.

"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?"

This is potentially a great problem but where your demanded rate needs to have a fixed component high enough to hire an account rep. They would be dedicated to this client but would likely still have bandwidth to service others. If you or devs are acting as part time customer service reps, stuff like this gets you out.

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.

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

One company I know of charged them enough to hire someone whose entire job was to politely tell them no.

Yup! Way better to just be direct and say, “I think we should part ways.”

Haha! I've had this exact same experience where one such bad customer became apologetic (especially when the found that alternative apps were bad) and stopped complaining.

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