I used to have a similarly bad attitude when I had low metered pricing. Once I insisted on monthly account minimums I could afford to hire a nice customer service person and not be so touchy all of the time.

This was a nice example of when not to. Thanks.

The way I handle most support requests is to make the UI easy enough so that people don't have that problem in the first place, though many still do, partly because of the unorthodox "email token to log in" system I switched to recently. Many people weren't used to that.

Back in the day Angry Birds cost $0.99 with no ads and you could use it forever. I downloaded it again recently just for nostalgia purposes and there is no option to get rid of ads. EA had a version of Tetris that cost $0.99 that was released during the 3.5” era was never upgraded, but stayed in the App Store until iOS didn’t support 32 bit apps. They replaced it with an ad supported version.

Let’s say you spend $100,000 to make a piece of software, you sell it to 150,000 people at a $1 a piece... and that’s it. People don’t keep paying for it, but you also don’t keep investing in it. You move on to making something new.

I don’t like this idea that you need to keep making money off something that you made years ago.

But more importantly, if you bought MS Office for a one time fee of $100 and the next month, Apple introduced a new form factor or new features and either MS didn’t support it all or forced you to pay the full retail price, would you be upset?

People buy apps and expect them to continue working when they upgrade their phone. What are you left with besides ads and subscriptions without upgrade pricing?

On the other hand for productivity apps, I would expect them to support split screen on the iPad when it was introduced and the File picker (it did).

Should Apple also have kept the Silicon needed to support 32 bit apps forever?

Clearly, there are other types of software that this doesn't make as much sense for.

"fix it!" -- "please give more details" or "sorry, this feature is not a near term deliverable" (which is a polite request to get lost). "I am going to a competitor" -- "we think our product is better, but encourage users to try alternatives", etc. My 2c.

Maybe it's possible that not pandering to the deadbeat clients actually improves your profitability?

There's also the fact that being a dick to rude people doesn't feel good to everyone. I can only truly speak for myself here, but being rude in proportion to some random person who started it and totally deserves it leaves me feeling bad afterward, like I allowed myself to get trolled. An angry client email, a profane reply to an innocuous online comment... You have the luxury of asynchronous communication to take a moment, let the blind rage pass, and reply in the even-keeled diction of business communications, maybe even killing them with kindness. Or just ignore 'em.

And with less customers the profits DOUBLED!

Sure, customers could be rude(I wish they were not but some people have a bad temperament or have something else going in their life and this was a tipping point) but did they wake you up in the morning and forced to create that app and give it to them for the price you sell it? I am sure that it's the other way around, you made an app that promises to solves a specific problem and you offered someone to solve their problem for that low price and they are unhappy that you did not kept your part of the deal.

I would be very pissed off too if the developer of a product that I bought decides that it's not a good business and makes the product unusable. It's not my job to calculate the fair price for the product, the product developers must do the calculation since they come up with the offer in first place. If the deal is made, I expect to to receive the full promised benefits of the product I bought.

That's actually why we have customer protection laws.

In my view, you extend people basic courtesy, whether you're paying them or not, and paying doesn't give you the right to act entitled. Price doesn't enter into it, I reply the same way to every rude customer, except one-off payments don't have "I won't give you any more money" to fall back on to excuse their bad behaviour.

This is entirely orthogonal to support - customer protection laws define what a customer is entitled to. Often, the call to customer support is an attempt to expedite the process beyond what the laws dictate. Many companies will gladly comply, as even a happy ex-customer is a win. But if someone's being rude, it's only fair to tell them to send a filled-in form by letter and expect a reply in 14 business days.

What happened to "we don't deal with terrorists"?

The answer of the developer seems reasonable to me if the point was "do this or I'll go to competitors", well, it's you right, do it then.

And if the customer was really that bad as it seems, I would have refunded them and let them go for good.

No amount of money can buy my time if I don't want to spend it doing something I don't want to do.

Customer protection laws are there to protect customers against misbeahavings, if I buy a Sony Television and they refuse to fix a broken one, I can appeal to customer's protection, if they refuse to add WIFI to a model that was born without it, it's in their rights.

If your skin is too thin to deal with angry customers you should not be facing them. There’re plenty of back office jobs out there. If you’re an enterpreneur, you probably should hire someone if you’re too easily offended.

Most of those angry customers are people who are suffering some kind of pain inflicted by your product. Some people are arsholes, others don’t handle stress well. Some have something else going on with their lives and this was a tipping point. Others are simply rude. But terrorist? No, they’re not terrorists.

Isn't terrorism about "making enemies"?

That's what you wrote.

> If your skin is too thin to deal with angry customers you should not be facing them

Isn't it exactly what the OP did?

> If you’re an enterpreneur, you probably should hire someone if you’re too easily offended.

I'm almost never offended.

But I'm not a psychologist, I don't have to deal with people hanger management problems and honestly I\m not even trained to.

> Most of those angry customers are people who are suffering some kind of pain inflicted by your product

That nobody ever forced to buy.

Small companies are usually made by a handful of people, working on a few products, all day.

Complaining that their support is not the best around is futile, they get the blame simply because they offer some form of support, because in the end they care about their customers and they obviously care more about 99.9% who appreciate their work than those few who do not.

The real offenders - Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. etc. - don't even offer a customer support while making billions out of their users.

People condemn individuals who are rude to their servers, but it seems to me, from the reactions in this thread, that they would just as easily condemn servers for pointing out the rudeness.

If someone is defending "customer is always right", then they've probably never had a client from hell.

People have become so entitled in all aspects of life, that they forget that there are people on the other end of their abuse.

The capitalist motto that "the customer is always right" has created the most entitled generation of rude and abusive customers.

The seller screws you over? Leave the 1 star review, get your refund and don't have to look back.

I sent a rude email to Gumstix in 2012 that I regret. If you are on here I am sorry.

Kudos to you for well handling that specific situation and making/letting the customer get back on track.

Thanks! It seemed to work out well for both me and the customer in the end.

I think an annoying thing is that people are (seem to be) completely unaware that they're (their brains) doing this

Put a sustainable pricing model in place that can afford support staff.

Sure, a bunch of cheapskates will up and leave - there will surely be a second rate competitor who will pick them up and offer the same poor or nonexistent support all over again.

One thing I learned from experience is that it's the people who pay the least who are the neediest and most frustrating to deal with.

As someone who has partaken in a support organization where 99% were annual payments and 1% were "golden licenses" (pay once, never again), I can confirm that the 1% were by far the worst.

And even if it's not technically a service, but say some closed source software or whatever, the same idea still applies for future bug fixes and maintenance, at least in my mind. At least for anything semi-critical.

That said, support as a subscription (or alternatively, pay-per-issue) is totally fine by me. I'm also fine if new features are added to Version 2, and I later have to decide whether to upgrade or not.

And although it is not about the money for me, it frequently does pay off. I usually opt for the longest recurring subscription (if lifetime is not available) which usually has steep discounts and in the case of my XM radio... still enjoying that lifetime subscription.

There's a potential that you're paying a huge premium (that you don't even see) just for the enjoyment of being rude to customers. Maybe that's something you value extremely highly, I don't know.

Sure, that's true.

> for the enjoyment of being rude to customers

I was rude to customers? For pointing out they can't talk to me like that? I may have gotten the definition of "rude" wrong.

"You don't think that was rude from them in the first place, I am answering in the same manner they talked to me. If they don't want it, then they should learn to talk nicer to me in the first place. Instead of assuming they can say whatever they want and get away with it.".

Interestingly, in the last decade my relatives have been a lot more polite with me when we talk.

Besides, people like the customer in question come once in a decade (to me, anyway), so it hasn't been a problem.

In this case, I'd pay money to not deal with a customer like that.

In the general case, I agree that you would lose money by not tolerating rudeness, but think that one generally has a societal responsibility to call out bad behaviour, to let people know that that's not acceptable. Also, I think that rude customers are generally not worth it because they tend to cost more than they bring in, statistically.

So while income could be maximized by acting differently, Stavros chooses to optimize for his well being instead.

??????

It does not enter his mind that normally I make a third of that and so I am very happy with the windfall. Heck, with hindsight I could see how I could have also made a million, but only by worrying over every dollars I invested. There is more to life than spend all your time thinking about how to make more money. I have gone camping, hiking and living at a cabin by a river. He on the other hand sound like he spent the entire year glued to his computer monitor trying to make more.

Is it a bad thing necessarily? If this customer brings more trouble than value, that wouldn't it be the best move to dump it to a competitor?

I don't like this attitude.

I don't see that it's reasonable to disregard the issues of a paying customer on account of their poor netiquette. They aren't a professional tester filing a bug-report, they're a paying customer with poor communication skills. I don't see that refusing to help them, and even mocking them, is an acceptable response. At the very least you're holding yourself to a low standard.

Paying gets you support, it doesn't get you the right to be rude to the person you're asking for help.

What would you have done?

Yes, their tone is rude, but it's not as if it's outright abusive. One can't be so thin-skinned as to take offence at punctuation. They also failed to provide any details about the problem, but that's what happens when you deal with customers rather than professional testers. The ability to file good bug-reports (or support requests) is a skill; you can't very well insist that all your customers must have it.

I sincerely don't understand how that's controversial at all. If someone on the street saw you and said "Hey! You! Help me cross the street NOW!!!" would you feel obligated to help them? Would it be rude to say "you can't talk to me like that"?

> I sincerely don't understand how that's controversial at all

There are gradations. If the customer were being truly offensive, that would be one thing, but in this case they're really just making themselves look like a petulant teenager.

I'd have rolled my eyes and got to work, knowing they'll probably behave better (and regret their silly outburst) once they know I'm taking them seriously.

If an employee sent a message with this level of rudeness, then sure, you'd want to have a word with them about their netiquette, but customers can't be held to the same standard.

This is where I think you're mistaken. Customers and clients like this, once they see they've gotten you under their thumb, will be more than happy to continue exploiting you.

Remember Stavros was charging a small lifetime fee. Clients from hell will twist this and try to make you their personal developer for as long as possible.

You seem to think that Stav should be thankful for the opportunity to fix the particular bug, but who's to say he wouldn't have discovered and fixed it on his own time?

Customers can and should be held to the same standard. Otherwise you end up with shit customers.

I'm not saying you're obligated to be a total pushover. You're certainly not obligated to agree to every feature-request, or even to every bug-fix request. I still don't think the way they handled the support request (such as it was) was appropriate.

> Stavros was charging a small lifetime fee. Clients from hell will twist this and try to make you their personal developer for as long as possible.

We don't have reason to believe this is what's happened here. I figure the customer was probably just frustrated and, yes, rather rude.

If you make the decision to sell a lifetime service, you take on some level of lifetime support obligation.

> You seem to think that Stav should be thankful for the opportunity to fix the particular bug, but who's to say he wouldn't have discovered and fixed it on his own time?

If handling their issue properly results in uncovering a bug, that's a good thing. I don't think it's of much consequence if you feel thankful.

The customer was still rude, sure. Does that outweigh the benefit of discovering a bug? I don't think it matters. The question is about offering good service and handling rude customers.

> Customers can and should be held to the same standard. Otherwise you end up with shit customers.

But you've already chosen to take their money in exchange for a lifetime service. It's not the same as declining to renew a contract.

If the customer is being outright abusive, that's reasonable grounds to decline to take on their support request. I'd draw the line somewhere above this sort of low-level rudeness though.

Also if you have them on a tiny service it's likely an indication of poor user experience: poor user interfaces, poor performance, poor documentation, poor reliability, etc.

Really? You don't think so? I begin my emails with "hello" and end with "thank you", which I have been taught is polite. What would be rude to you?

When I'm frustrated I try to collect myself and be mannered. It's not an excuse. Communicating properly not only makes everyone lives better but also allows better understanding. It's more efficient.

So I'm using a car sharing system. The car is great. The app is a weird, slow, HTML-ish thingy that appears to trigger bluetooth bugs and frequently loses state.

So I drive my family to a friend. My partner will then continue the trip with our kid. What you need to do, is get out, lock the car, and close the reservation. Then my partner can create a new reservation, and continue driving.

We're already late. It's hot outside. Kid is crying. I open the app, lock the car, and close the reservation. App fails with vague error. My partner is standing there, kid and phone in arm, asking "c'mon hurry".

I call the support line, and give him the problem. The support guy asks me to go through a series of steps. Then I flip and scream: "DAMNIT I'm sick and tired of this app failing me, it's never simply a painless process and now I'm standing here in the heat with a crying kid".

He laughs and says: "I understand but I'm trying to help you, sir. How about you let me talk to the partner?"

To this day, I'm both ashamed, amazed and happy how professional this guy was.

My takeaway from the reactions in this thread is that businesses are culturally expected to let the customer walk all over them, and anything other than "thank you for your abuse, now please let me help you" is considered rude.

I guess most people here in HN never worked in customer support, or as cashier and such.

Treat people with respect. Customer support already mentally tax people, much more that you would expect if you never worked in it.

I have a customer facing job and I work closely with the customer service department so I'm exposed to a lot of this (I meet customers face to face as well), and it's shocking how rude and abusive some people can get to another human being.

I tell people all the time to stuff their attitude up their holes and start over if they want any help from me. I'm a human being; I will not accept people talking like that to me.

Those customers sure wouldn't accept it if I acted like that to them, why should the reverse be okay?

I'm not arguing against calling out poor behavior... I've just seen startups with this business model and attitude get absolutely crushed when one bad customer hires a lawyer.