Fire Your Customers

I love seeing stories like this one: Royal Caribbean bans complaining couple for life.

I've been on both the business and consumer side of situations where a brand fails to meet expectations, and I'm glad to see Royal Caribbean stand up for themselves.

Essentially, a couple complained incessantly about their experiences with the cruise line (yet continued to use the same company over and over again). The company offered compensation but apparently that wasn't enough for these people. So... the company (quite politely) has told them to walk the plank.

People like these complainers ruin brand experiences for everyone. They aren't far removed from the people who like to take businesses to court over every little thing.

From the brand's perspective:
The complainers cost money to fight or compensate, of course, but their behaviour also forces industries to increasingly institute policies to cover their butts (such as these examples), and generally lead to a lowering of expectations -- "We can't guarantee that people won't be disturbed at night, so we better not mention that we offer a quiet environment"... "We might run out of something at the buffet, so let's not say anything about how big it is"...

From the (other) consumers' perspective:
The complainers lead to higher prices, of course, and they inevitably harm the impact of real complaints. This particular article mentions just one legitimate problem (a clogged toilet - and who knows if they didn't clog it themselves). Over the course of six cruises they complained about five, though. So imagine if you're another passenger on those five cruises and you have a real problem. The staff have just had to deal with whatever non-issue these people are whining about. No matter how professional the staff are, will they really be at their most attentive and caring when dealing with you?

With some customers you can just tell that they're looking to get something for nothing. It doesn't matter if they're scammers or they have an unrealistic sense of entitlement - the result is the same.

One example from a previous job sticks in my mind. A customer (using the term loosely - our records showed that she had likely never bought from us), called our customer care department requesting a particular free sample product. They had a few issues with this, tried to appease, but had to bring this case to my attention for help.
Here's the situation:
1. The special offer associated with this free sample had been advertised several months earlier. Although the offer didn't have a stated expiration date, the publication it was advertised in did expire.
2. We no longer had any of these particular samples.
3. The ad in question had two offers: "Free sample with any purchase" and "Free shipping with a minimum purchase". This customer didn't qualify for either of these, but wanted both.

So, we tried to explain this to her. Didn't work. She was convinced that we were trying to pull a fast one.
We tried to satisfy her by extending the expiration date and giving her a different freebie of similar value with her next purchase. Didn't work. She didn't feel any need to make a purchase to get something.
As a last-ditch effort, we offered her a gift card with a value far more than the original freebie and more than enough to cover a small purchase (including shipping, if she didn't want to go to a store). She didn't refuse this one, but she still complained to Advertising Standards.

Long story short, Ad Standards contacted us, I explained the situation, they felt no need to take the concern any further. I don't think we ever heard from this woman again.

I think we reacted appropriately, but in retrospect it would have been nice to simply say "Sorry we couldn't satisfy... 'bye". The time, effort, and expense that went into trying to appease this person could have been much better spent satisfying a "good" customer.

Sprint famously fired a large group of customers a few months ago based on how much they had called customer service. Again, they were nice about it and even gave the customers a free month of service to finish off.

I'd love to see more of this. If every brand cleaned house and refused to do business with the least-profitable, most unfairly-complaining, most frequently confused or angry, etc. customers, I'd bet that the brand experience would improve dramatically for many of the remaining clients.

I'm a huge fan of legitimately complaining about a bad brand experience. That's a major point of this blog, after all. I think it's great that consumers are gaining more and more power, largely due to the capabilities of the Internet. But the Royal Caribbean example shows how this power can be abused.