How to deal with fucking annoying users?

J

Jabberwokky

New member
Apr 12, 2010
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So I responded to this one customer's seemingly simple question... and somehow it turned into a game of 20 questions which are already repeated profusely on the website.

Even responding with "the answer your looking for is fully detailed here: URL"... somehow he/she could think of another question. If I don't respond, I am the asshole. If I do respond, I get another question. What a sick game.

I am talking 20 emails in 20 minutes. If they were in proximity of me, I would physically harm them.

What to do with a user like this? Just say fuck him? Money is money though...

On the bright side.. I find these incredibly annoying questioners almost always turn into paying customers. Probably a 90% ratio.

How do you deal with customers-sans-amis?
 


That's business, if you don't want to deal with customers you can always become a janitor
 
Respond every 12 hours instead of every minute. When he realizes he won't get a response in 60 seconds, he'll stop asking stupid questions.

Or just refund his money, and tell him it's best if he looks for the product / service elsewhere.
 
You can see this situation as an opportunity on how to improve on answering annoying customers like them. Maybe you can have some notes ready and place them on a word document, if you get the same question by different customer all you have to do is copy and paste it. This will save you time on having to go through the process of answering the question.

You can never get rid of this type of customers. They do pop out once in a while. The idea here is to come up with a brilliant idea on how to handle them. You never know they ask more questions because their intention was to get as very much details as they want before becoming a paid customer. They would not be wasting their time sending you emails if they want to play around, right? But if they do this just to stir you off or want to annoy, this would be another story.
 
@johnmatrix, seriously? I am talking about a 1 in 200 type of customer here. 99.5% of them are amazing.

@Phillip P, I hear you, and that was my first instinct, but quickly disciplined myself. Now I am just looking to cure my nightmares.

@cougarclaws, If I could, I would :/

@Kipoa Matt, Your suggestion is what I eventually resorted to (responding late). The user just happened to catch me during my email answering session and I was dumb enough to follow along. Even after an hours delayed response however, I must have received one back within a few seconds.

@ultimatewriters, Agreed. I have begun to redirect them to our help forum which should help mitigate my total number of responses.
 
For me it's the low revenue customer that gives me the most grief. The ones that I make decent revenue off of are the ones that are the least headache to handle.

I guess it's true. No pain no gain. :)
 
I had exactly the same situation many times and it is usually around 1% of all my customers taking 99% of our time, so I decided to fire them (in a very nice way). My employee's time is worth more money than that 1% waster who almost always cancels after a month anyway (its a continuity program).

But, my service is low cost, hence not being worth my employee's time, if your product is high cost and high lifetime value I would rethink this strategy.
 
I wouldn't bite the hand that feeds you, and if you help the guy out he could bring more customers to you if he felt like he was taken cared of like a baby.
 
It's called customer service. Two options:

1) Deal with it
2) Get somebody to deal with it instead

If you don't deal with it, your business won't get a good reputation ever. Problem is you never know who this 'stupid' customer is. Might be the one who goes bulk next time and gets your new Rolex!
 
Deal with it else ready to lose your business. I would suggest you to rather hire a calm customer care representative.
 
There's also another aspect to these annoying customers that are very, let's call it, verbal. If you treat them in a manner they don't regard as good customer service, they're also the ones to tweet and blog about you.

Just reply hours after you normally would (i.e. not 20 answers in 20 minutes) and they'll most likely eventually drop off. As you said, they're almost always buying customers anyway, so..
 
Cap the time bill over.

"Dear _______ in order to better serve you we are implementing a new customer service program that will allow us to better serve you and give your business the additional attention blah, blah blah.

Beginning October . . . .
 
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