The Customer You Want To Lose
By Sanya Weathers
In all the discussion of forming relationships and driving retention ever upwards, it’s easy to lose sight of one slightly unpleasant fact – that there are customers you’re better off not retaining.
These customer types fall into a few simple categories:
– Never Going To Be Happy. Maybe you’re building a product that will not under any circumstances do the thing the customer wants it to do. Maybe the customer was just born negative and if you do grant his wish, he’ll find something else to be miserable over. Who knows. It barely matters. This kind of customer is like having a permanent little black rain cloud over your head… and over the heads of people who haven’t yet made up their mind.
– The Jerk. I don’t mean the usual internet warrior behavior, which is not unlike the dominance rituals of chickens (lots of strutting, squawking, and ruffling of feathers to look bigger than actual size) and entertaining for everyone else to watch. The jerk specializes in personal remarks. He carefully reads the rules in order to stay within the letter if not the spirit of them. Every person he can chase off gets him points in a game where losing must mean death, considering how intent he is on upsetting other people.
– The Lie Detector. This customer thinks you’re lying. About everything. No matter what you say, he will demand “proof.” If you fall for this schtick, and produce proof, to him it will either be insufficient, obviously faked, or not what he meant. It would be funny if he weren’t coherent enough to convince other people that you’re lying. If pressed he says he just cares so much about the genre/niche/product that he feel compelled to speak out.
A mod with no experience lets these run rampant because they think the shiny light of truth will take care of the problem. (Protip – that does not actually work on the internet.) A mod with some experience will get rid of Jerks, but overthink the other two categories. “I don’t want people to think I have something to hide/I don’t want to crush all dissension/he’ll go onto forums I can’t control to say he was banned for telling the truth.”
A mod with a lot of experience knows that you can’t possibly crush all dissension in a public place without shutting it down any more than weeding dandelions gets them all out of your lawn. An experienced mod can also tell the difference between a legitimate gripe that needs to be aired and someone with, shall we say, “issues.” Finally, an experienced mod has perspective. So what if someone goes to a third party forum and complains? Oh, no, someone is saying crazy things on the internet. If you’ve got a good community team in place, you’ll know if something is going to grow into an actual issue before it’s too late to speak.
This doesn’t apply to just forums, by the way. If your product allows users to interact with each other, you need to be watching all of those points of interaction for the three archetypes of evil.
Provide avenues of appeal for those you ban, be willing to accept that you might have overreacted and need to reverse yourself, and you’ll be all right in the long term. In the short term, look for these blights on your community and excise them before they spread to normal people sitting on the fence. Once these mentalities get established, they’re nearly impossible to remove – and they chase off existing and potential customers.