On Thu, 16 Aug 2007, D. Ryan Spott wrote:
I am looking for advice and examples of what to do with PITA customers.
Hmm. This is a tough question, really. It depends more on what they are doing to make themselves a PITA. Just a couple of stories perhaps will tell you how I handle that kind of thing.
Many years ago (this was during the heyday of dialup), I had a customer who I saw scanning my servers. He was a young kid, but I knew he was capable to do what I saw him do. For him, I called his mother and let her know what was happening, and let her know that it would not be tolerated. She went on the defensive immediately. "My son would not do intentional harm..." and the like. At any rate, I let her know it couldn't continue. The very next day, I saw a dramatic increase in the same activity from his IP. I called his mother again, and asked to speak with her son and her at the same time. She got him on the phone, and I explained that what he was up to was criminal, and if I saw it again, we would file charges and their account would be terminated. Again, the excuses, but when we saw it again, I spoke to a friend of mine, who just happened to be the constable in their town (their next door neighbor, in fact). He had no clue what he was saying, but he went by there and told them of the complaint. We dropped the account, then called each of our competitors who offered local dialup in the area, provided evidence and left it at that. When they moved about a year later, I don't think they had ever been able to get online since that day (at least not local).
Another customer on an ISP that I am a small owner in was running a game server. We repeatedly noticed that he was causing issues for the other customers. I asked him repeatedly to move the game server off my network. He never complied, so I began creating an increasingly difficult situation for him by firewalling and queueing his connection until he moved to another network. In this case, I WANTED him on the competitor's network (his only option was 1 of 3 802.11b networks). Good riddance.
One other story. This customer was one who had grandkids that came in and were installing P2P apps on her computer. She knew nothing about it, but it continued to happen. We continued to help her get rid of the software (3 or 4 times) until she finally was convinced that her "sweet grandkids" would no longer be able to use her computer. Problem solved, and we kept a customer. Scored some good word of mouth in the process as well.
I have a few that are just shy of abusive on the phone.
This type I generally just tolerated to a point. If they are just rude, then that is just part of what happens when your customer base grows large enough. This is a hard one, because I know how I would LIKE to handle it...Just not a good idea to go there.
FWIW, I've got stories like the ones above (many of them) from every ISP I have owned/worked for. This is just a part of the game that you have to deal with.
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