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How To Deal With Abusive Customers

Posted on February 16, 2007 by in customer service

If you weren’t so abrasive and rude, I would’ve refunded your money – even though we are under *no* legal obligation to do so.

I am now marking your email address as spam and your communication will no longer get through. If you don’t want to use our service any more, please cancel your account.

I have taken this conversation completely out of context because context doesn’t matter in customer service (the bold bits are mine, too).  The only thing that matters is you keeping your cool, and this can frequently require having the patience of Job and less ego than a blade of grass.  The above conversation is not one I would consider a good example of conflict resolution on the part of the representative who sent it.  That was Ryan Carson of Dropsend, incidentally, and you can read the context on his blog post about it.  Ryan asked publicly how other folks would have answered.  Here is my response, and the rationale.

The initial stimulus:

Refund me the 5 dollars ASAP

This would set me looking in my transaction records, where I would find that the customer has just done an instantaneously upgrade/downgrade for a subscription service and been charged a pro-rated amount to the end of the month.  Here is my response.

Thank you for using Dropsend [the name of the application at issue].  I received your message asking for a refund of $5, and have instructed our credit card processor to refund you.  Is there anything else I can help you with?

What did that cost me?  $5, thirty seconds of research time, and counting to five before allowing someone’s lack of civility to ruffle me.  The $5 I will get back from this customer next month, and even if I don’t its $5 and that is below my care threshold as a business owner (or as anything, really).  The research time was a sunk cost the moment he said “refund” because I have to check that he is a customer to be physically able to process a payment.  The five seconds is the expensive bit for most people, because that requires suppressing your ego, and that can be irksome.  Regardless, this response a) totally resolves the problem for the customer and b) keeps them happy and ready to pay me next month.  As an actual bonus if the customer is having some support related issue they might email me back and allow me to fix it, improving the quality of my service for the thousands of  customers I have who are not in on this email exchange.  If they don’t mail me back, thats OK too — I’m doing things that matter for the business and not swapping a series of hostile emails with someone which will gain me nothing.

Oh, sure, you can go searching for a rationale on why allowing yourself an ego (I’m using this in the non-pejorative sense of the word) is a good idea.  “They’ll walk all over me”.  “We have a policy against this.” “If I do it for him I’ll have to do it for everybody”.  Hogwash, irrelevent, and don’t care.  The overwhelming majority of your customers in the software business will never ask for a refund or contact support (I’m talking about packaged software or services here which are substantially identical for all customers).   Suppose some fraction of your support requests walk over you — so what?  Support requesters make up a tiny fraction of your turnover every month, and a tiny fraction times a tiny fraction equals a “cost of doing business”.  Your blood pressure is more important than that .1% of customers who want to wheedle over $5.

Another reason to kill this exchange after the first email is that it prevents escalation.   Escalation is what takes you from “My, didn’t this chap’s mother ever teach him manners?” to “FINE!  I DIDN’T WANT YOUR MONEY ANYWAY!”  Its easy to see it in hindsight but, in the heat of the moment, most people don’t recognize they are doing it.  As a result, you want to practice what the IR/polisci buffs call a commitment strategy — basically, you decide beforehand that if someone has an issue you are going to be obsequious about it.  Obsequious.  What a lovely word — did you know that there are several ways to say it in Japanese and that not all of them are considered negative?  I often wish English had a word for when you need to be a spineless craven lickspittle in a good way.  Learn from the Japanese, they have the “I can put a polite reserved face on this for the sake of our continued relationship even though I’m absolutely fuming on the inside” down to an art form.  (That face is called tatemae, the feeling on the inside is called honne.  There, you learned your bit of linguistic trivia for the day.)

See, if you start escalating, you will allow yourself to be drawn into an argument with your customer.  You can win an argument with your boss.  You can win an argument with your wife.  You can even win an argument with God.  But you will never win an argument with your customer.  You might get the last word in, and puff out your chest, and then find that they cancel their subscription and/or chargeback you.  And in the pursuit of a lousy five stinking bucks you’ve just lost a $50 revenue stream over the next year, which is almost pure profit because you are selling a software service which requires no marginal work, you’ve risked getting bitten for $15 by Visa when they chargeback and having to waste an hour of your life repeating the argument to a series of bored Visa representatives who are all thinking “Why did I sign up to do this job?  Everyone acts like children” (you’ll lose the chargeback, by the way), and worst of all you’re stressed.

You might think you would be stressed if you suppressed your ego.  True, for the first two weeks or so.  After that it just becomes a habit.  You learn to mentally shut out the torrent of abuse in your ear and skip over the written invective, and when you get a word in edgewise say “OK, what can I do to help?”  Trust me, I worked in a call center — if you learn how to do this, you can work in a call center for your entire life and not get tired.  If you don’t, you will burn out in a matter of months.  Just pretend you’re like that character from Firefly who, when faced with a stressful situation, repeats a mantra: “I am a leaf on the wind.  Watch me soar.”  And, well, ignore the fact that those were his last words.

 Ah, the company has a policy against refunds.  Here is the great thing about running your own business: you are the boss.  If your company has a policy against refunds, you can break it at will.  Call it an exception, call it a special accomodation, call it a goodwill expenditure, call it whatever the heck you want — the policy is a few bits on a server somewhere.  If you refund this customer, who will fault you for it?  Certainly not your boss — you are the boss!  And, as long as you’re the boss, why don’t you rewrite your policy against refunds saying that you’ll gladly give out refunds.  Its the key to getting your fantastic customer service to scale.  This chap you’re giving the refund to might tell a friend or write a blog post… of course, he’ll probably tell no one.  However, a nice prominent guarantee like “We’ll refund your last payment anytime, for any reason.” gets seen by every prospect who is worried “Hmm, what if I’m not happy?”

Even if you have some darn good reason to be a Scrooge in print in your policy, don’t get trapped into the “If I make an exception once I’ll have to make an exception for everyone”.  Says who?  Your boss?  You are the boss.  Boolean propositional logic?  You’re a businessman, not a computer programmer.  If the accomodation advances your business goals make it, end of discussion.  Your customers are an incestuous bunch but they mostly don’t talk about how easy it is to screw you over (mostly: in some markets they might.  I hope you’re not doing business in those markets).  Instead, they typically talk in terms of ecstatic, happy, and furious.  If they never have a problem, they’re happy.  If the last time they had a problem, you bent over backwards, they won’t think “This guy is a pushover!” (even though you are!  And good for you!) but they’ll think “Wow, the service here is amazing!”  And if you have a two year long relationship with a customer, without any previous bad incident, and then you send them one teensy-tinesy email saying “I would have refunded your money, but decided to keep it.  Nyaa nyaa.”, now they’re furious.  And they will never ever again be anything but furious.

The Art of Apologizing

Posted on August 26, 2006 by in customer service

In a post which made many excellent points about customer service in general, TryBeta.com said the following about offering apologies:

2) Take the blame for ALL mistakes
Did a bug in your software crash your customers computer or was it an error on their part? Who cares! Apologize for anything that goes wrong and offer to fix it. Tell them how important this issue is and get it fixed ASAP.

They don’t want to deal with your company anymore? Give them a refund before they get the chargeback and bad mouth your product. Never take money from a customer who can not use your software as advertised, whether or not it is your fault or theirs.

This obviously sounds a lot like advice I’ve been giving for a while.  If I can expand on it: apologizing literally works magic on people, particularly sincere apologizing (not “I’m sorry you’re too stupid to use our software but thats the way it is”).  Its also free.  I would generally counsel apologizing for just about any unfavorable experience your customer has, and then immediately telling them what you’re going to do to correct it.  If you want to earn extra bonus points, give them options, because people often like being in control.  For example, if your program doesn’t have a particular feature and they mail you saying “Hey, where is this feature?”, you could say something like “I’m sorry, we don’t have that feature at present.”  If you’re planning on implementing it soon, great, say so.  If not, don’t.  Either way, suggest a work around and perhaps remind them that you’re totally committed to them being happy and if they’re not happy you’re happy to refund their purchase.  Very few people will actually take you up on that offer, but they will remember you making it for the duration they do business with you.
Apologizing can be difficult if you’re not used to it.  I would advise trying to minimize how much your ego is involved in the process.  My software is my baby, but its not so much a part of me that I can’t count to five when someone says they can’t use it (even if thats because they’ve purchased something clearly not designed for their use).  After you’ve gotten used to it, it really just rolls off the tongue.  For example, at my job at Quill, I would frequently have to do a bit of customer-service magic to find the records for customers who filled out forms incorrectly.  Often times this would happen with them actually on the phone, and the process takes about 30 seconds.  There are a couple of options for dealing with this smallest of inconviniences: snippily asking the customer to remember their customer number next time, saying “Please hold” and leaving 30 seconds of dead air, or a quick apology.  My set script for this was “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.  The computer seems to be acting up a bit.  You know computers, can’t live with them, can’t live without them.  *pause for chuckle/commiseration from customer* *finds records*  Aha, here we go.  So, how can I help you today, Mrs. Smith?”  Its a little thing, but excellence is getting the little things right.  (To head off the objection at the pass: There are some sort of lies which I don’t consider all that troublesome.  “The computer is acting up” is the “No, honey, that dress looks great on you” of customer service.  Inanimate objects which you own rarely resent being blamed for your customers’ mistakes.)

Japanese people are, to make an overgeneralization, great at using apologies as a social lubricant.  For example, when I went to the grocery store yesterday, I spent 15 minutes looking for tacos.  After 15 minutes I flagged down one of the employees, who talked to who supervisor, who called the guy who knew where the tacos were (in the Chinese food section… naturally).  I was completely nonplussed, but I got apologized to profusely by all three people involved for wasting my time.  Does this make me happy to come back to the store in the future?  Yes, certainly.  If I had been irked about wasting 15 minutes of my day, would this have made me feel better?  Yes, a bit.  And it costs absolutely nothing to do.

I Took My Own Advice… And It Paid Off

Posted on August 24, 2006 by in customer service

Recently, I have received a lot of mails from a customer of mine.  We’ll call her Sally.  Sally works for a particular state government agency and has a function coming up, which she bought Bingo Card Creator for.  Sally has also sent me roughly one mail a day for the last week.  Sometimes the mails were feature requests, sometimes the mails were generic questions about bingo, sometimes the mails were just about how happy the folks at her function would be.

Now, I’ll admit, I am a weak person and was tempted to ask Sally to be a bit less enthusiastic after the first couple of emails.  But I decided to go ahead and practice what I preached.  I encouraged Sally to continue sending any feedback she had, and got busily to work on her feature requests, most of which were on the “To be implemented sometime when I’m very, very bored” list.  Well, it turns out after actually sitting down and coding them (took about 4 hours total) they were a lot less of an excercize in frustration than I thought they would be and they really, seriously improve the program.  So yay for me.

So I sent Sally a sneak-peak of the new and improved Bingo Card Creator 1.04 (I’ll probably release it for real next week after I get a few more word lists banged out).  And Sally was happy.  Like, deliriously happy.  Like, so happy she is recommending Bingo Card Creator to everyone she knows happy.  And that makes me happy.

What makes me particularly happy is that it turns out “everyone she knows” includes the staff of some institutions Sally’s government agency oversees.  Think, say, fire departments, except she’s not in the State Bureau for Managing Fire Departments.   But, for the sake of scale, you can assume there is one of these institutions per fire department.

Do you know how many fire departments are in a mid-sized American state?  Well, it turns out there is a publicly available list of them.  The list runs to 100 pages, single-spaced.  And Sally is busily working her email lists and telling people at her conferences that I’m the best thing for fire departments since the dalmation.  Given that I have sold a grand total of, hmm, 15 copies of Bingo Card Creator so far, I think this is probably going to be a rather noticable impact on ye olde bottom line.

So, my takeaway bit of advice is: before you tell a customer “no” out of laziness, are you sure you’re not turning away your very own Sally?

Support Does Not Scale. Customer Service Does.

Posted on August 3, 2006 by in customer service, popular, support

I’m a big fan of all things scaling, because thats what takes you from having to scramble for money on an hour-to-hour basis and gets you to the whole “Making money while drinking pina coladas on the beach” (or, in my case, iced tea in the shade) ideal uISV existence. Two of commenters recently left well-reasoned comments to the general effect that “Support costs a lot of your time and most users don’t need it. Don’t go overboard. Instead, help out the vast majority of your customers who don’t need support.” My comments:

Cutting a customer off: There is a certain school of thought that says you should have a maximum level of tolerance for any particular customer using support resources, and after that point you say “No more”. I actually think this is (potentially, depending on execution) a decent idea, which might suprise people in light of my recent paen to excellent customer service posts. You might also be suprised to learn that I’ve described someone doing it in the last 24 hours.

Here’s the cruel math of telephone customer service: the average cost of servicing a phone call is $12. The average profit of a small order is less. You cannot afford to absorb a support call for every small order. Class poll: who caught the fact that when the the representative offered free shipping and cookies to a minor no-profit-in-this-transaction customer it terminated a (potentially hostile) support incident in under a minute, totally obviated the need for a second call or an escalation to the supervisor, and still got the sale? And that that customer was so ecstatic to be brushed off he came back bearing hundreds of thousands of dollars? Thats the difference between support and customer service. As a support incident, that call was a waste of time/money. As an opportunity for demonstrating you’ve got an unparalleled dedication to customer service, that call is as good an opportunity as every other customer contact you make.

Saving Money/Time on Support: Your first line of defense against “wasting time” (never, ever, ever think of talking to a customer as a waste of time: see below) in support is producing a quality product. I sell to a rather non-technical market. I could be spending the rest of my life fielding calls on how to use the product — and I rather don’t want to, so I coded the project to be immediately usable by anyone who is capable of finding the Internet. The handholding starts at downloading/installation (clicking enter until you can’t anymore works and will dump you at my program’s main screen) and continues to my main screen (which doesn’t just explain what you need to do, it reads my app’s typical use case out to you, step by step). Improving your application is probably one of the best-scaling support investments you can make: if you consistently find yourself copy-pasting a canned “That feature is in the Tools Menu, 3rd from the bottom” response, you should probably go about making it more obvious. If you have a work-around for that annoying printing bug, fix the annoying printing bug.

How to Think of Support: I would generally advise against thinking that you’re wasting time doing support. Most people are rather poor actors — heck, most actors are rather poor actors. If you’re annoyed by the incident thats likely to come across to your customers. Think of it as an investment if it helps you — you’re investing in your reputation as a customer-service powerhouse. Against a reputation like that, firing off a few emails every day is cheap. (Think of it: suppose that 5% is an accurate accounting of the number of “needy” customers you have. Suppose you’re rolling in the dough at 1,000 orders a month. 5% of 1000 is 50, multiply by say 4 inquiries each is 200, averages to 7 per day. 7 emails a day is nothing — you can take care of that while brewing coffee.)

Politeness and a smile are free: You can’t always say yes to a customer request (although I’d strongly suggest defaulting to yes and requiring good reasons to say no, rather than the other way around). You can, however, have 100% of your customer-facing communications be polite and positive. For instance, compare the following two emails.

Bob,

You emailed me about this support issue 4 times this week. I’ve done what I can for you. Its obvious things aren’t working out. I’m refunding your purchase price.

Sincerely, Peevish uISV

Thats the wrong way to do things.

Dear Bob,

I have done some research regarding your support request. As it turns out, our product is regrettably not the best on the market for your needs. In our professional opinion, MicroFoos’ Foozle 2006 is a closer fit for your requirements. While it pains us to have not been able to help you, here at Pleasant ISV we are totally dedicated to customer satisfaction. Accordingly, we could not in good conscience accept your money with these issues outstanding, and have instructed our credit card processor to refund you.

Thank you for choosing Pleasant ISV and we look forward to the opportunity of serving you in the future.

Sincerely, Pleasant ISV

Content-wise, these emails describe the exact same set of circumstances. In terms of customer perception, these two emails are worlds apart from each other. Peevish ISV’s mail is, well, brusque and strongly leaves the impression that there was something wrong with the customer. Pleasant ISV’s mail doesn’t blame anyone (no, really, read it again — it doesn’t say or imply a single negative thing about Pleasant). It screams “we’re competent, we’re professionals, and we don’t accept anything less than the best”, and it leaves the door open rather than slamming it on your customer’s fingers.

An inspirational quote: “ We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — I have seen this one variously attributed to Aristotle and Adlai E. Stevenson. In any event, if you make excellence the routine in your customer service, people will know the difference. Promising good support/promising good customer service scales very well for your business. Think of it like the guarantee: you can’t afford for everyone to ask for their money back, but you know in advance that the overwhelming majority of people will not ask for their money back. And you know that the number of customers reassured by having the guarantee outweighs what you’ll spend on it. Support is exactly the same. Most people won’t need it, but lots of people are reassured by the fact that it is available if they do need it. Your customers have been trained for years to distrust software, despite the fact that most customers will not have any problems: software is impersonal, software gets in the way of them doing what they need to do, software breaks, and when software breaks they spend 10 hours in tech-support heck talking to people who hate them and don’t have any answers.

What if you could reassure customers? What if you had a deserved reputation for *not* blowing up in people’s faces, and for being a joy to work with? So beat the drum and beat it loudly:

If you have any problems, or just want to ask a question, talk to us. We have an actual human here. Even better — not just an actual human, you’ll get all your support emails answered directly from the head engineer/company president! (Try that with your other software vendors some time!) We care about your concerns and will work to make them right. Take a look at what Mary Sue of Normal, IL and Bob Smith of San Fransisco had to say about us: “Wow, I had expected to get a canned reply but they got back to me within 15 minutes and kept working until my problem was solved.” and “Pleasant uISV is the best in the industry, bar none. Once I bought one of their products and it wasn’t working out for me. They gave me my money back without me even asking and referred me to a competitor! It was more important that I be happy than that they make a buck. I’ll never stop using Pleasant and I recommend them to everyone I do business with.”

Or, you could say something like

Support incidents: Every customer has a maximum of four support incidents, after which they must pay a non-negotiable charge of $24.95 per incident. We do not answer requests about generic computer configuration problems, setting up web pages, etc etc.

Which of these two companies would you rather do business with? Which sounds like a risky investment? Which sounds warm and inviting?

Semi-Offtopic: The Passion of the Customers

Posted on August 2, 2006 by in customer service, popular

I haven’t worked at Quill in years but I just remembered my favorite thing about the place: there is a wall right next to the breakroom which is devoted to customer service (have I mentioned that they’re fanatics about this?) It has daily metrics (I was never quite sure how they were gathered, but I suppose there must be a combination of phone surveys and automagically collected data) covering all the usual suspects: what percentage of customers are very satisfied, satisfied, etc; what percentage of orders had errors and where in the chain that error was localized to (one summer there was a spike on that graph, from “absurdly low” to “industry standard”, directly attributable to my team. You can draw your own conclusions as to how many of us kept our jobs.)

But my favorite part of the wall was letters. Quill had, to my knowledge as a lowly worker bee, two policies regarding letters: first, they were all collected and any workers individually singled out in them had the action noted on a publicly-visible board and in their file (and Quill would FIND you: there was at least one letter addressed to “that lovely Spanish woman with the Texan accent” and, by God, she got the credit for it). Second, the letters and/or copies (some people couldn’t bear to part with them) were posted on the bulletin board next to the numbers.

Anyhow, my favorite letter wasn’t a letter at all. It was a prayer card from a convent in, as I recall, New York. For anonymity’s sake we’ll call them the Sisters of Perpetual Gladness. Oh, they were a happy bunch, and it was contagious. Do you know why we had a prayer card from the Sisters of Perpetual Gladness? I don’t, because the people named on the card (whom the Sisters had dedicated a novena to — thats nine days of prayer, for you non-Catholics in the room) wouldn’t say exactly what they had done. Thats my personal metric for customer excellence: Nuns Praying For You (NPFY). Paypal, yeah, there’s a NPFY-0 business if I ever saw one. Quill probably has the highest NPFY of any any business I’ve ever been associated with. Keep in mind we were earning NPFY60+ for, well, prompt delivery of paper and pens.
But the Sisters were loyal customers and in Order Entry we lived for their call. I got one once — it made my year. And the Sister blessed me, too. I blessed her back, which was probably technically against company policy (although if you’ve been reading closely you know that when stacked against customer satisfaction policies were more like guidelines and guidelines were more like advice and advice was more like suggestions and suggestions were more like comments). Anyhow, for the Sisters, if they had asked Order Entry “We’d like an 18-wheeler filled full of printer paper and the most we’re willing to pay is, hmm, nothing. Oh, overnight delivery, too.” the only thing we would have said is “But Sister, where will we put your cookies?”

There was only one problem with the Sisters. We had some heavy-duty CRM (customer relations management) software at Quill. It supported locking a customer to one particular desk or extension — for example, if you’re the Big Important Government Account with a 6,000 page bid request your order is probably too important to be handled by $10-an-hour me, so you got locked to a specialist. The Sisters did not require any special handling like that. As a matter of fact, they required a specially-written rule to ban handling like that for their account. The reason was that every lowly worker bee could put a special handling restriction on an account, and everyone could take off a restriction from someone at equal-or-less access level, which made the Sisters’ account history look like a Wiki revert war (“They’re MINE!” “NO, they’re MINE!” “My family is from New York! I should get to call them*” “But you’re Jewish!” “So are you!” “Yeah, but I dated a Catholic once!” etc, etc)

* The Sisters’ order always had a problem requiring calling them, immediately. Typically, it was that they had missed an opportunity to get free cookies. At any given time, you see, Quill had hundreds or thousands of promotions running. Dozens of these ended in the punch-line “Free Mrs. Fields’ Cookies”. We got a very stern notice every month “Here are a list of the new promotion codes, in case a customer forgets. Remember, Mrs. Fields’ Cookies are NOT appropriate as a we’re-sorry and the customer must specifically mention the promotion to receive the premium.” An exceptionally morally upright employee would phrase the phone call something like this:

“God bless you. This is Sisters of Perpetual Gladness, Sister Mary speaking. How can I help you?”

“Hello Sister Mary, this is Bob for Quill Corporation Office Supplies. I was wondering if I could speak to you about your order of *checks watch* two minutes ago?”

“Oh, certainly.”

“Well, Sister Mary, we reviewed your order and there seems to be a problem. The last 47 times you’ve ordered with Quill, you ordered one free tub of Mrs. Fields’ Cookies. We see there are no cookies on this order, and wondered if there might be an omission.”

“Oh, thats certainly kind of you, but we didn’t see the free offer…”

“Didn’t see? Why, no problem, we can look it up for you. Do you know what catalog you were using?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t have it in front of me.”

“Hmm, I’ll bet it was the *check premium list* California july legal small offices circular.”

“Err, are you sure?”

“Well, did your catalog have the word Quill and some brightly colored office supplies on the front cover?”

“Yes, yes, it did.”

“Well, mystery solved! So did the circular. The promo was on page 437b. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll go right ahead and get this order and your cookies you to you. You don’t have to do a thing.”

“Why, thank you very much young man. God bless you.”

“God bless you too, Sister Mary.”

More Business Firsts

Posted on August 2, 2006 by in customer service, popular

Processed my first refund today (um, yay?). Can I give a piece of advice for everyone who has a money-back guarantee (which should be everyone): any time your customer asks to invoke the guarantee, process the refund immediately, then write back to your customer.

Minimally, you should thank them for choosing your software then inform them you have refunded their purchase at their request, and sign off gracefully. If you feel the need to ask why, you can then ask why, but phrase it in such a way as it sounds like a favor to you rather than a business request. People will generally respond pretty favorably to requests for a 10 second favor after you’ve just given them money.

I learned this lesson through my first real employment, which was as an order entry operator at Quill Corporation Office Supplies. Quill is outwardly fanatical about customer service: without violating any confidences regarding their internal guidelines, suffice it to say they would rather have some customers get away with murder than inconvinience another customer to the tune of 5 bucks. I have seen their customer satisfaction metrics and the comparison to other companies in the industry, and the fanaticism works.

You might be inclined to ask why the person is returning the software, and then process the return pending a reasonable explanation. This is a mistake. There is no question that your customer can get money from you: the question is whether they go through you or they chargeback. I can scarcely find words to describe how much better for you it is that they go through you. Well, OK, here’s an attempt: if they go through you, it costs you either “nothing” or “very little” depending on your payment processor, if they chargeback you will frequently get hit with a large fee ($25+) on top of paying your payment processor fees, and frequent chargebacks will get your account yanked.

You might be inclined to write off a customer who has requested a refund. From a support perspective, this is correct. From a politeness perspective, wrong move. You’re not Quill with 6 figures worth of customers, but you are in a niche market, and your niche talks to each other. The next time your ex-customer is chatting with his friend and his friend expresses the same need he had, he will always, invariably, talk about his experience with you. Since he’s your ex-customer, this will not be a maximally positive conversation, but you can choose whether its “Well, I bought from Bingo Card Creator. It didn’t do exactly what I wanted but when I asked for a refund I got it in 10 minutes and I was impressed by his professionalism” or “I bought from those “#$”#%”$#!s at Bingo Card Creator. What a scam. It crashed my computer three times and when I demanded my money back I had to fight him three days for it. Burn in “#$#”$”, “#$”#%”#%”. So, Bob, how are your kids doing?”

Big deal, you think, how many people are going to buy or not buy on the basis of a quick conversation with a co-worker? Answer: this is the most influential form of advertising you will ever get in your life. I remember getting an all-hands memo when Quill gained a $X00,000 a year account because the purchasing officer had a good experience seeking a technically-out-of-bounds accomodation when ordering a single cartridge of toner for his wife. He wanted free shipping on a $Y order. We didn’t offer free shipping until $45. The representative he spoke to said “No problem sir, we’ll make an exception for you. And have a box of Mrs. Fields’ Cookies as our thanks for calling in”. Do you know what a box of Mrs. Fields cookies and eating a shipping charge costs us? Suffice it to say that its more than the amount of profit the company made on a $Y order. Do you know how much profit a $X00,000 account makes in a year? It pays for a whole lot of cookies.

(P.S. If your uISV ever requires office supplies, I heartily recommend my old colleagues at Quill. You will find no better service in the industry than you will get at Quill. If I’m wrong, the cookies are on me.)

Stupidly simple thing to keep in mind as a uISV: always leave enough money in your account to cover the most damaging single return you’re currently liable for. If you have a 100% money-back guarantee policy for 30 days, and you’ve sold $1000 of product in $25 increments, keep minimally $25 in your account. If you’re using Paypal, this will decrease the amount of time it takes to get your refund authorized. Even if you’re not, if you have to do account-balancing tricks to get your customer their refund (in my case, that could possibly require an international wire from Japan to the US, followed by funding my Paypal account and then processing the refund), it will take a while and peeve off your customer. What if two people request refunds? In this case, you’ve probably done something wrong. :)

Oh, why offer a refund? In a nutshell, because the marginal number of customers the refund offer will get you outweighs by many orders of magnitude the amount of charges you will eat processing refunds. Steve Pavlina covered this better than I ever could (search for “guarantee”, although the rest of his advice is decent, too).

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