Customers will talk. The question is whether they'll say "This annoying thing happened and I don't recommend them" or "but they made it up to me with ______, and I was really satisfied at the end."

I totally understand that mentality. I'm just saying I've found it helpful, sometimes, to let other people have the last word. Sometimes my original statement stands for itself and doesn't need to be reiterated.

I don't necessarily think you were being unreasonable. I don't have enough information to really judge that, especially if it comes down to tone. I'm just saying in general that if you're going to do things like this, to keep in mind that the other person is also testing and judging you. Maybe he didn't care about good customer service and your heuristic for determining a good vendor worked, or maybe you tripped his heuristic for determining a toxic customer and he decided to write you off. To some extent that'll have to happen, but it's worth maybe a moment's consideration. That's all.

I personally avoid talking to customer's service as much as I can. I'm more likely to give up on a product or switch to alternatives than say anything. There are a very few exceptions to this. I suspect many other people are like me.

So one bad experience can undo a lit of good ones. These days, one person with a large social media following can tell a great many people for the same effort it would take to tell one person and may not stop until their ire has died down, which can take a while and may be oit of proportion to the harm they experienced, especially if they are going through personal stuff (wife died, their business went bankrupt, whatever).

Anecdote: first real customer (a reseller) of a consumer product that involved cell phone apps, web services and custom hardware. He had to drive by his customer 3 times because our product failed 3 times (hardware failure, configuration mistake, error in the manual). Each time the phone rang at our office we were slightly afraid it was him again. Most of the times, it was.

After it was all over and the product flew and the consumer was happy, the reseller sent us a mail about how much he enjoyed working with us and how we really cared about him and his customer. We had given him cause to drive to his customer, 100km away, 3 times too often. We expected an angry resignation, not compliments!

The bar really is ridiculously low.

This, semi-regularly, results in customers who notice this policy and take advantage of it. You end up in a situation where you either have to piss off a customer or do mountains of work that have nothing to do with the scope of your product simply because the customer is convinced its your fault (or he's a dink that knows if he pretends its your fault, he'll get something out of you).

My biggest falling is that. And unfortunately, I feel that the customers who are like that, are also the ones who make the biggest noise. I'm in a relatively sensitive industry where my customers tend to be doing a lot of research before picking my product, so I can't afford to have any bad noise floating around.

Just an anecdote/personal vent very related to the discussion.

However, to me, there is a line. "The customer is always right" can't be literal.

I have no issue parting ways, with a full refund, for toxic customers that repeatedly use abusive language with my employees. Especially when it's not relative to the situation. These kind of customers do exist. It's not common, but do e-commerce long enough and you'll run into one.

There are also (not often) customers that engage in return fraud or other activity that is just obvious cause to avoid them in the future.

When a company is huge, even one out of 100,000 transactions going badly adds up to a lot of anecdotes.

That may be, and that's why it's a good idea to wait for proof. People saying "I told you so" or "Every time" are missing the point and not helping.

I just had to chime in here, 2 is coincidence but 3 is a trend. They did the exact same thing to us, spending months telling us to solve an issue that was clearly a result of issues on their end, and despite repeated proof would push us into meetings at really unkind times, not doing the steps we recommended and being increasingly rude and accusatory while demanding time with the product team simply to express discontent.

I would have loved to be able to just say no.

I have no problem with 116 orders going awry out of thousands, apparently through no fault of 27bslash6, shit happens sometimes. The way they handled things after this initial problem is what generated the majority of ire against them on Reddit (so it seemed to me at least). Just because his/their actions are in character does not excuse them. If he wants to continue his asshole persona to even dealing with people who are his direct paying customers and his customers are happy with this, then they get what they deserve. But count me out.

And yeah, I read about this story yesterday and didn't think it particularly HN relevant. But seeing as someone did post it and to me - after thinking about it - it is a story primarily about customer relations, I thought I may as well comment.