(2025-01-13) Procopio The Customer Is Wrong

Joe Procopio: The Customer Is Wrong. There are people out there who don’t want to pay for anything, especially what your business is offering, and they’re expensive, costing you time and money you don’t have. If left unchecked, they will wreck your business.

there are three types of customers. You almost assuredly have all three right now.

Target customers are your ideal customers. You probably have a small slice of these and you likely know a handful of them by name. You almost consider these folks your friends.

Regular customers are the vast majority of your customer base. These are transactional customers, and for them, you’re constantly trying to improve your offering and keep them happy.

However, your finger isn’t exactly on their pulse, so to speak, so you have to use a combination of data and metrics and gut to take the temperature of their satisfaction, and that can be hard to read.

These customers are critically important to the health of your business, if only because there are so many of them. When you hear the phrase,”The customer is always right,” that’s referring to this type of customer, because you have to give them the benefit of the doubt even though they’re not always right.

Expensive customers are people who don’t want to pay anything and want everything. They are a sneaky subset of your regular customer type. Bad Customer

You’ll just wake up one day to some kind of formal message or lawsuit or something.

When I was head of product at Spiffy — mobile vehicle care and maintenance — I sat near customer service.

every once in a blue moon, we screwed up, and when we did, we made the customer much more than whole. But 90 to 99 percent of the time, it was just an expensive customer trying to weasel their way out of paying a fair price for a service they ordered that was performed to perfection.

So here’s what we did. Here’s what I still do today

What Stripe was telling me was that one of my paid newsletter subscribers had initiated a dispute through their credit card issuer.

the customer had been a paying subscriber for a while, there was no misunderstanding.

They even rated a few newsletters, all 10/10.

Now, they were only disputing the most recent charge, not anything they paid before that, so you know what I did?

I refunded every penny they ever spent.

You can call it a message, but it’s not intended to be one. It’s intended to serve as the lever to get an expensive customer out of my business forever before that customer does more damage than I am willing to fix.

Fortunately, expensive customers are infrequent, but they’re not rare. Be proactive about them and get them out of your life, nicely, generously, but quickly and by any means necessary.