I recently had an email exchange with the “support” department of a company that has a Twitter client, which is currently in a closed beta. I put support in quotes because I didn’t receive any support at all, only a bad attitude.
Here’s an excerpt of one of the emails I received from them:
its a closed beta in development we have zero time to answer any emails yet we do. each user costs us money today…so to be very clear here providing this service to you costs me money. you are not our customer we were kind enough to provide you with a useful service.
There are two immediate problems here:
- Offering a popular product and then complaining to one of your customers that they’re costing you money and leave you no time to answer emails is shooting yourself in the foot.
- Users of your free products are, in fact, your customers. In this case, the customers are also de facto employees since they’re testing the product and providing feedback, and thus should be treated as the valuable asset they are.
And also notice how poorly the email was formatted. The punctuation is poor, and each sentence begins with a lower case letter. Perfection is not required, but competence is.
What sense does it make to launch a startup and offer a product if you’re going to resent the users of that product? This experience reminded me of the Demotivator titled Apathy: If we don’t take care of the customer, maybe they’ll stop bugging us.
This customer certainly did.
