Re: Another lousy Borland experience

Wayne Niddery [TeamB] wrote:

Jolyon Smith wrote:

How do you "sack" a customer who has already bought your product?

Offer them their money back since that is going to be cheaper than
attempting to support a customer that cannot be satisfied.

Yup. And in the long run, you get a reputation for fair dealing. I've
"fired a customer" several times back when I was running my own
consultancy, and only then after lengthy attempts to resolve the
issues, resolve any possible personel conflicts, extensive free rework.

Only after exhausting all possible avenues did we finally say, "Look,
here's all the code we've cut for you, here's all the documents
associated with the project and here's a cheque for all the time we've
billed. We can't see a way forward from this, and it appears that our
relationship with you isn't working so rather than having both of spend
more time and more money on this, we should just shake hands and call
it quits."

In *every* case the customer's response was positive and funnily
enough, a year or two later, after the dust had settled they'd come
back and say, "Listen, we've had some staffing changes and we've been
unable to get the problem solved. Would you come back and have a look
at it again? You treated us with a lot of respect the last time and we
really valued your honesty when we parted ways." And you know what,
we'd chew through the problem, and voila, the solution would be
implemented.

In retrospect, I think a lot of this was due to *both* organizations
"growing up" and learning from what happened before.

Of course, YMMV.
--
John Wester
- Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts.
.

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