Difficult customers!

[willm]

Like most Indie developers I do tech support for my own games. I take pride in being prompt and helpful, but sometimes I am faced with customers, or potential customers that make it very difficult to be profesional. I'm happy to help computer newbies, but some people just seem to want to pick a fight..

Anyone else have to deal with problem customers? What is the best way to deal with them?

Will McGugan

[george]

respect yourself, your customers, and your business, it's as simple as that. if you calmly handle the situation, address the customer's issues, and give a good explanation and resolution to the issue, you will be surprised how customer's attitudes can change. i have talked customers out of refunding, even when there was a huge bug in a new version that stopped the program from completely working ;-) of course, there will always be jackasses, but just try your best :-)

[Savant]

If you're going to do front line support for your products, you're going to have to develop a thick skin. If you can't then you're going to have to get out of it and have someone else handle it for you.

The only customers who are going to be using your support lines are the ones who don't know that much about their computers. A guy who knows what a video driver is, how to find the latest one, etc. isn't going to be the guy contacting you ... it's going to be the guy who got a new computer from Dell and has no idea what he's doing beyond powering it up. His son is at school and he needs the answer -now-.

Remember too that most people, by the time they get to the point of contacting customer support, are already pissed. They've reached their breaking point and are contacting you as a last ditch effort to make whatever they bought, work. They're going to be punchy and irritable - just human nature.

[willm]

I guess I dont mind tecnhical support issues, even from p***ed off customers, because they can usualy be solved and the customer goes away happy.

I had one exchange of emails a while back for Chess Commander. This customer was playing against the computer, and it did an 'en passant' move. At that point he closed the game and wrote me an angry email. I explained that this was a valid move in chess and refered him to a wesite to explain it - very politely! But he refused to believe it was true, because he had been playing chess for 20 years, and demanded to know when I was going to fix it.

I had another customer who download the full version, but it wouldn't work (never found out why). So she asked for a refund, which I dutifuly gave, but the she downloaded it again and asked for another refund. This happened 3 times, before I managed to explain that the download itself didn't charge her credit card. Actualy I guess that wasnt so bad, she wasn't rude at all.

Oh well. I cant complain, most of my tech support is from nice, reasonable people..

[Armsfeld]

If a customer was truly unreasonable, you could give them a refund and refer them to a mainstream game company.