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Modern Machine Shop ran an interesting piece recently under the title, "Why Is It Okay to Fire a Customer?" https://www.mmsonline.com/blog/post/why-is-it-okay-to-fire-a-customer. Here are a few clippings for your interest:
We work overtime to meet the demands of our customers and rightly so. Our success depends on our reputation and repeat business. So much so that going the extra mile in communication and delivery has effectively become the new baseline for good customer service for successful businesses.
This is all well and good. I'm proud of our industry's efforts to elevate the standard through innovation and technology, and it's working. Even so, elevated standards mean bigger risks for customers and suppliers alike, making the century-old saying of "the customer is always right" somewhat of an overstatement. What was once sealed with a handshake is now enforced by contracts and documents written to protect all involved parties.
[...] In my 26 years of leading Pioneer Service [CNC machine shop], I've had the unfortunate but necessary task of firing exactly two customers. The common thread between them was a deal-breaking level of disrespect. They directed accusatory and demeaning language to multiple members of my team, and they were unapologetic repeat offenders. Firing them [customers] was considered only after taking every reasonable measure (and perhaps a few less reasonable ones) to make them happy.
Thankfully, this is an extreme minority of customers. I will never enjoy firing anyone, employee or customer, but I have yet to regret standing up for a member of my team.
[...] Just before firing one of the two offending customers, I approached the employee who had been that customer's favorite target. I'll call him Dave. My goal was simply to reassure Dave that he'd done nothing wrong. Dave was shocked, didn't want me to fire the customer and tried to dismiss the rude behavior. My explanation to him was the same phrase I say to all of my employees: "You've got my back; I've got your back.
Anyone work for a boss/owner like this?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Saturday February 15 2020, @08:07AM (5 children)
Over the years demographers have coined various terms for groups based on generation and/or life status (e.g., empty nesters, sandwich generation, boomers). For that very small slice of the demographic that has to be "fired" as a customer, I think of them as being in their own little group: The Insatiables.
Unlike all the other groups, businesses would like to avoid attracting them as customers in the first place. Nobody wants to market to them, appeal to them, or cater to them because they will literally cost the business money.
I saw this first hand way back in my tech support days. All calls were logged, and some people had really long logs. In some cases, management was willing to retain the customer at a loss if they were learning, were polite, and weren't using a ridiculous number of support hours. It was no doubt written off as good-will.
The hardcore Insatiables that were fired had some combination of high resource use, failure to learn, abusive language towards techs and/or customer service, and perhaps some other factors. As techs, making this decision wasn't our call. AFAIK, some fairly high level manager in Customer Support did it, and it was quite rare just as the summary says.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 15 2020, @08:46AM (3 children)
We call a similar person a "Karen" around here.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 15 2020, @01:43PM (2 children)
Life noob.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 15 2020, @08:38PM (1 child)
You know you're out of touch when . . .
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 16 2020, @01:51AM
Out of touch with people who don't know fuck-all? Yup.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 15 2020, @12:15PM
At work we have a low level QA employee with a heart of gold and a brain of mud. The rest of the team spends more time supporting him than it would take us to accomplish everything he does. But he's friendly and forever polite, so we frankly shield from upper management how unproductive he is.
...of course it's all still relative. We've had some junior level executives that are pretty smart make us spend years of work and millions of dollars building products we couldn't get anyone to buy. They're still employed - and probably paid $200k more than our lovable but useless member of the QA team.