god, I hate stupid people

When your customer call's you to complain, ask/beg for refund, what they are asking you is to help them spend more money. It's your responsibility to upsell these people. That or talk them out of whatever it is they want done, and then upsell them. These customer "service" issues are nothing but "opportunities". These people don't know what they want. It's your job to show them what they want. And yes even your $9.99 penis enhancement ebook qualifies.

One time I took a call where the guy was trying to get a refund on his "product" This guy had never even bought from me (insisted he had) and my questions confirmed he had a competitor product. All the while talking to this guy he was "jerking off" and moaning quietly in the background.
 


Since we're sharing stories, when I was 5, I got my dad's credit card, and asked for his 'autograph'. I then traced with tracing paper, rubbed it onto another piece of paper, then traced that and rubbed it onto an order form. I ordered £400 of office supplies. BALLIN




although my dad unfortunately noticed the giant van of stuff and got them to refund him after a couple of days :(
 
contract said:
Granted customer service used to = $$$$$$. In a world where Walmart and Blockbuster (closed) can take over the mom and pop shops, you realize people don't really give a fuck about themselves. They want to save their money, and sure why wouldn't they? I'd hate to work at a shit job, making no money doing something I hate, and then have to fork it over.. But the day of personalized service and loyalty are slowly going away..
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Agree. I think there's a very small % of people who actually care about getting good service and are willing to pay for it. Seems like most people (at least here in the US) have acquired the "I'm not responsible for anything, I shouldn't have to do this, this isn't fair" mindset and they just try to skimp on everything. I still try to give "good" cust service but at the same time if I think someone fits the profile of one of those people who will be asking lots of questions and not buying enough stuff to justify it, I'll just ignore them because there are so many of them out there just itching to waste your time.

dmnEPC said:
When your customer call's you to complain, ask/beg for refund, what they are asking you is to help them spend more money. It's your responsibility to upsell these people. That or talk them out of whatever it is they want done, and then upsell them. These customer "service" issues are nothing but "opportunities". These people don't know what they want. It's your job to show them what they want. And yes even your $9.99 penis enhancement ebook qualifies.
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That's really interesting. I'll definitely try it out. Care to give some more details? The 3 most prominent reasons for requesting refunds would be (1) blatant lie, like "my 2 year old ordered it on my card" - not sure how to combat this (2) product didn't work - suppose you could give them tips on other things to do at the same time like exercise and such then upsell them a related product? (3) not happy with recurring billing - maybe tell them it works better if you take it for an extended period of time, and in conjunction with X product?
 
o hai guyz said:
I don't even get why people feel the need to act like idiots, especially in the cases of fully legitimate products.
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Because so many people are melodramatic jackholes that allow their emotions to lead them through life.

The negative to that is you have to deal with crazy shit like this woman and her 'son' as a product dev/owner.

The positive is -- it's those same people that you get to buy and buy and buy again because they can't control their emotional responses.

I agree with others that said you should bring in a team to gatekeep that shit. I used to find myself saying over and over and over again - I can't ever be surprised by peoples' stupidity.

And then I would be blown away again by new levels of nonsense.

Once I started outsourcing that stuff, it was like the weight of the world was lifted off me.
 
It's a trade off. You either deal with customers yourself or you deal with employees. Even outsourcers are a pain in the ass sometimes. My thoughts on it change from day to day, depending on who I'm more irritated with at the moment. Today my employees won. I am going to fire a 20 yr old web designer and he's probably a crier.
 
o hai guyz said:
That's really interesting. I'll definitely try it out. Care to give some more details? The 3 most prominent reasons for requesting refunds would be (1) blatant lie, like "my 2 year old ordered it on my card" - not sure how to combat this (2) product didn't work - suppose you could give them tips on other things to do at the same time like exercise and such then upsell them a related product? (3) not happy with recurring billing - maybe tell them it works better if you take it for an extended period of time, and in conjunction with X product?
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(1) blatant lie, like "my 2 year old ordered it on my card" - not sure how to combat this

How many of these are you getting? If you're selling anything even halfway respectable, this should be fairly rare. However even if this is the case I would begin by asking some "apparently" non specific open ended questions (that will help you change their mind) This is kind of like a expedition. You need to ask non threatening questions to determine if on the off chance the customer may have even a remote interest. This person is blatantly lying to you so you need to handle this delicately. The answers to these carefully crafted questions will later give the customer the opportunity to "gracefully" back out of the "cat stepped on my keyboard to order" bs and change his mind. These questions are fairly niche specific so it's hard to be specific. But the key her is to "believe him" and not to call him a liar. You will be amazed what you can do with this type of person. Just remember it's all in the questions.

(2) product didn't work - suppose you could give them tips on other things to do at the same time like exercise and such then upsell them a related product?

Again this is going to come back to your "open ended questions' You want to ask questions about his expectations. Asking open ended questions about how he would maybe change it if he could. This is not the place to correct him. Just let him talk and keep asking him questions. (these questions will lead you closing him) After you have asked him your questions, you can then proceed to making some recommendations. Maybe it's an upgrade or worst case a downgrade (if possible)

Your questions are the key to this. If you ask yes or no questions you're fucked.

(3) not happy with recurring billing - maybe tell them it works better if you take it for an extended period of time, and in conjunction with X product?

Again it's all about the questions. Ask the right questions and your customer will do whatever you tell him to. Feel free to PM if you want more niche specific ideas for your questions. Either way stop and think about the most frequently asked Objections you get. You want to find out what the real reason they want to get their money back. Alot of people will throw up a bullshit smoke screen (cat walked on my keyboard) and not tell you the real reason they are canceling. It's your #1 priority to find out what the real reason is. The only way you can do this is by asking those (supposedly non-related probing questions). When you ask the right questions they will tell you everything.

And no matter what remember your ABC's

Always Be Closing
 
BenPOF said:
We had a lady call in and claim that her cat walked over her keyboard and in doing so, entered her credit card information and signed up for a membership for her account.
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find this hard to believe to be true, but I sure did LOL.
 
Question for those of you who said you outsourced 100% of your cust service: Completely ignoring the cost of the cust service itself (call center and/or in-house reps, etc), have your profit margins generally stayed the same or decreased since doing this? I'd really like to do it but I always think nobody will be able to do things as well as I do them, they won't be as good at upselling, they won't be as good at making decisions, etc. which right now is the only thing stopping me.
 
Some of you are doing it wrong. Stop trying to please everyone and only cater to those customers that give you the biggest return on your time. The rest of your "customers" - tell them to fuck off.
 
KennyPowers said:
Some of you are doing it wrong. Stop trying to please everyone and only cater to those customers that give you the biggest return on your time. The rest of your "customers" - tell them to fuck off.
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Truth. Someone much smarter than me told me when I was starting out:

"It's the 80/20 rule. 20% of your customers generate 80% of your revenue, take care of them. Likewise, 20% of your customers cause 80% of your problems; let them go."

Same applies to employees.
 
BabyGotBacklink said:
Truth. Someone much smarter than me told me when I was starting out:

"It's the 80/20 rule. 20% of your customers generate 80% of your revenue, take care of them. Likewise, 20% of your customers cause 80% of your problems; let them go."

Same applies to employees.
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I'd assume that applies more to large ecommerce sites with huge product selections, or retail businesses, or even facebook/mobile games that rely on addicted players, etc. and not the stuff *most* advertisers here are doing. I've heard the rule before (actually when I heard it it was 90/10) so I ran a study of all the data on one of my sites for the past year, and it wasn't true at all: the top 25% of buyers accounted for 25% of the sales, which is actually why I stopped trying to cater to them (they'd constantly request things like better deals for repeat buyers and so on, and I'd spend lots of time trying to figure out how to appease the whales, and after analyzing the data found out it was a complete waste of time).
 
-joe- said:
Since we're sharing stories, when I was 5, I got my dad's credit card, and asked for his 'autograph'. I then traced with tracing paper, rubbed it onto another piece of paper, then traced that and rubbed it onto an order form. I ordered £400 of office supplies. BALLIN




although my dad unfortunately noticed the giant van of stuff and got them to refund him after a couple of days :(
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Thats very impressive for a 5 year old. I would feel fucking happy if my kid does that at 5.
 
o hai guyz said:
I'd assume that applies more to large ecommerce sites with huge product selections, or retail businesses, or even facebook/mobile games that rely on addicted players, etc. and not the stuff *most* advertisers here are doing. I've heard the rule before (actually when I heard it it was 90/10) so I ran a study of all the data on one of my sites for the past year, and it wasn't true at all: the top 25% of buyers accounted for 25% of the sales, which is actually why I stopped trying to cater to them (they'd constantly request things like better deals for repeat buyers and so on, and I'd spend lots of time trying to figure out how to appease the whales, and after analyzing the data found out it was a complete waste of time).
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The 80/20 rule show's up in different way's. Like anything it's not a hard and fast rule. But the 80/20 rule show's up in different way's. It sounds like in your case 20% of your customer's were using 80% of your time.

Respect the 80/20 rule. You never know when it is going to show up.
 
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