I agree, it’s great to “remove” trouble customers that cost you money… but you do it subtly, with price changes, and such. Not by going onto Reddit and being a jerk.
Of course… that’s also a short term view. A happy customer, who may be in your lower revenue bucket today, might
… and if you put them off your company … you might be doing more harm than good.
It’s also a common sentiment that 20% of your customers are 80% of your revenue.
But as Chad said, that is a static view. The engineering firms I’ve worked for are interested in the Next Big Thing, and every research program is a waste of money, until it turns into a huge business and ends up paying for the next 30 research projects. They talk a lot about “white space” and finding new markets that don’t have dominant players yet. Those 20% of customers that cost a lot or the 80% that aren’t as profitable might be the next whales. Or they might be feeding into the ecosystem of the whales (like a terrible nba team gives the big markets someone to play against).
Also, I have seen LBOs come in and drop the bottom 80% of customers, and the associated costs (lay offs). They become crazy profitable, and then sell off. It works really well for a few years, but it isn’t a good long term strategy.
I think we’re all saying the same thing here. There’s certainly a cost/benefit to trying to satisfy unhappy customers. It’s not the same for all business and it’s sometimes beneficial to kick them out, but hopefully one can do that without being a jerk. Or if you want to be aggressive about kicking out problem customers, maybe being a jerk would achieve that, but it seems like a poorly targeted technique because some good customers will be put off too.
Also there is a cost/benefit to pursuing product quality, which is an interesting problem by itself. There is pride in high quality and for a lot of people it feels natural to pursue the highest quality. But then there are also many laid-off US machinists who are angry at Chinese “good enough” products and the overall taste for Harbor Freight stuff that is not heirloom quality. This could be a whole discussion by itself, and where the MPCNC fits along this spectrum is also interesting. But in the reddit situation with the screws, it seems like a no-brainer to take the feedback seriously and respectfully even if you’re going to tell the customer to take a hike (although it probably would not have escalated if the feedback were taken respectfully).
I have a line item in my price estimates for MBS markup… “major bull shit”
I have a Millright Mega V, so far customer service has been perfect, always updating when there were delays on shipment, currently one of my motors has went bad and they are replacing it under warranty. Always nice and courteous. This dude just wanted a situation to get some karma and wanted to be entitled, mistakes happen just be nice and treat them how you would want to be treated and shit just seems to work. There is also a very active community on facebook and any problems I’ve had have been of my own making and they helped me fix it quickly.