A few days ago, I had a potential customer from one of my ads that completely blew my mind.

I must have had about a dozen emails from the guy. As the email communications progressed, I realized he was a problem client.

Now, I like people, and I could relate to some of their frustrations........but.........when we were into the fifth or sixth exchange.....I realized that this guy was a potential disaster waiting to happen.

After about the eighth communication, I tried to pull up his domain because he was a refugee from another hosting company.

When the page came up with a 401 not authorized, I was not the least bit surprised.

Well, the end result was that I politely, or should I say sarcastically, let the potential client know that he was being unreasonable.

Now I have to admit, after email 12 or so, I did not want this man on my servers. I was about 2 inches from telling him I wouldn't host him if he was the last guy on earth.

Thank God, he decided that I was insulting him and he would go elsewhere.

This man was a tech support nightmare waiting to happen, and honestly, I have had alot of them.....but he was rude and I could tell very troublesome in the long run.

Anyway, I kinda felt bad, but I feel I did the right thing for me.

Has Anyone else done something like this to save their sanity?

Robert

That kind of thing happens all the time,. but at the end of the day, you got to remember that not everyone is finely tuned in the ways of the internet, and some people simply just don't have a clue what certain things are, and need them explaining.

I see your point, but i'd suggest that unless he's harassing your tech's for some reason, you should "suck it up".

Now, if it moves on to harassment, then that's a different story, for another topic ;)

In the end, when you shut them up with happy service, its all good. They rarely contact me now.

I would say that most of my customer START out high maintenance... Lots of IM's, emails, support tickets, etc. But with good service and attention to detail, you will have a low maintenance customer before long.

The time that a customer comes to you to switch because of annother host can be stressful, unpleasant, and often confrontational. But, like <<joshiee>> said, in the end good service wins the day in almost all cases.

I would have given the client some time, show him the excellent hosting he felt he deserved, and made him satisifed to the point of "no reason to complain". Some people just need to vent? But this all depends on what you are personally willing to handle.

My two cents...

Yeah- I agree with what others have stated. Most customers are high-maintenance at first, but once they are on their way, are usually fine.

Zak

I just had a client sign up last week and he got his email accounts setup in his control panel without contacting us, so I figured he kinda knew what he was doing. But then he needed to know how to check his email with Outlook. I gave him detailed instructions on how to do it. He had no luck at all. Sent him the links to some flash tutorials, no luck. Sent him to the Outlook homepage, no luck. Getting pretty frustrated.... Then called him to walk him through it on the phone and realized he was an 82 year old man, running a small business from his retirement home. Turned out he was a pretty nice guy and was now committed to ONLY my services from now on because of the way I handled the situation. About 10 minutes of my time overall, and gained a faithful client. I wouldn't be so quick to turn away my customers.

I have found the customers that you invest the most time in and are the hardest to set up are generally the most loyal and give the most recommendations to their friends so maybe it pays off in the long term...

I fully agree with GrahamC, similiar situation as ravegti1, only it was some very nice middle aged lady.

Eventually, she leased 2 dedicated servers from me :)

I also have a very rude customer. First he gave us an outstation cheque for payment which was not payable to our bank's branch. Took nearly one month to clear and we were also charged clearence charges. Now he wanted to register a domain name for him on credit. But when I told him that he'll have to pay by cash, he freaked out. Called me by all bad names. After that I too lost my control. Don't mind loosing him for good.

So much for demanding something you ought to be paid in advance.

KS

I have 1 client who emails me everytime their is a problem, which is good, but he writes at least 5 paragraphs (NO JOKE) on what is the problem and his "Theory" and than he also tells me how i should run my business.

I had a client send me about 40 E-Mails as they tried to get through our order form with their "Grandma's" credit card. (12-13 year old)

After about the second week of trying to get through the order form, I found out that his friend was hosting with us, as well. Apparently, his friend had given him a bit of access on his website, and he setup a mailbombing script.

As soon as I found out, I told him that I wouldn't host him under any circumstances. He continued to try to signup. Eventually, he got in under his "Aunt's" name or something... and setup his mailbomb script. He hasn't been back since we terminated his account without refund for violating the TOS.

There have been other similar clients, it's really aggravating when you don't want them to have an account and they keep trying to signup. :(

Regards,
Matt

I turn away potential clients rather frequently. I do it politely though by saying I don't think we will be a good fit and that I don't think I'll be able to meet their expectations. It's always my fault, and not theirs. I've been doing this long enough now that I can generally tell through the first contact if a potential client is going to be profitable or not. Of course, I'm sure I've turned away some that would be great clients, but that is the price you pay. I don't run a charity, so if the client is not profitable then there is no sense in having them.

There is an old business rule called the 80/20 rule. It can mean several things such as 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients, or in this case 80% of support req's (your time spent) comes from 20% of your clients. The rule generally holds firm with any business. My goal was to reduce this figure to 90/10, or even lower, as I wanted to increase profits through growth, without incurring correlating support expenditures. So far I’ve met, and even surpassed, my goal. Having five full servers (and growing), they generate only 10-20 support req's a week. The clients I have get excellent support as I don't generally have to deal with stupid questions all day long.

Your mileage may vary.

It's been mentioned, but I also generally find that clients are a bit support heavy in their first week or two and then I never hear from them again.

The posters here make good points, but only you can decide what is best for you/your company.

Sure you can suck it up and maybe the client will turn into a 'low maintenance' client. But then again they may not :(

If your gut feeling tells you not to bother with that client, then go with that and don't worry about it. ;)

I don't think BobMarley is talking about the typical high initial needs clients... more the complete psycho, drive you crazy people. They are out there. There are some people who believe that a client is a client, business is business, money is money, and I respect that, but I'm not like that. If you cause me more mental anguish than it's worth, I'll pass.

Likewise, some people feel that family is family, and others won't talk to their brother. Same idea working here. In life, you decide who you want to deal with and who you need to distance yorself from so that you don't walk into a crowded supermarket and open fire. Your personal mental health is more important than money in my book. Do what you gotta do.

It's for these high maintenance "clients" that I'm writing all my knowledgebase articles. Eventually, I intend to have enough written so that only those that really can't comprehend anything will have to talk to me.

Of course, I don't run any sort of webhosting business yet. I might in the future but at the moment there's no point. And for those that are always doing a whois on my site (which, the new layout isn't done yet) that's a website for a game that I do free hosting for. So..*sticks out tongue*

Greetings:

Over the past eight years, we've found the best clients to get are the high maintenance ones.

As was stated earlier, the maintenance does go down over time (for us one to six months). And if you have a track record of keeping customers happy for years, even six months is a short time span when you look at annual revenues.

Thank you.

Thanks for the replies.

The first few posts might have been under the impression that I haven't had ALOT of experience dealing with customers of all levels. Fact is, I have been in the computer business since 1986 and dealt with newbies all my life, we currently have over a thousand hosted customers, and its true, the ones that were a little high maintenance in the beginning were very appreciative of that extra mile we go. And yes, many of them turned out to be our best customers.

I think this quote nailed it on the head:

<quote>"the complete psycho, drive you crazy people"</quote>

And this quote sums it up:

<quote>"If your gut feeling tells you not to bother with that client, then go with that and don't worry about it."</quote>

TTYL,

Robert