Thread: How NOT To Deal With Customers

Hey, for anyone who is interested in how not to run a business, there's a great example over at Penny Arcade. The PR guy for a company launching a new game controller first didn't give answers towards when a customer could receive a product that was pre-ordered, then proceeded to threaten to cancel the customer's order. When the customer asks further questions beyond when he'll receive his order, the guy tells him he'll sell the customer's order on Ebay.

When the (obviously) dissatisfied customer forwards the emails to a few blogs and one extremely popular webcomic that runs a big convention, all hell breaks loose. The PR guy states in an email to the webcomic that he knows the top guys in the industry and that they shouldn't mess with him. The webcomic proceeds to post the PR guys email and twitter on their blog in addition to posting all the emails they had received.

As a result, this guy has lost his contract with the company making the product, and he has been disowned by the entire community he works in. In addition he has had angry readers track down his facebook, his wife's facebook, make fake twitter profiles claiming to be him, write blogs about him, leave harassing messages on his phone and email, and turned him into an internet meme. Not only that, the product the guy was hired to advertise has been completely trashed on amazon, and currently 200+ reviews most of which involve how horrible their impression of this company's customer service has been.

This is the complete opposite of how customers should be treated and is a perfect example of how mistreating customers can come back to haunt you, the people you work with, the products you're involved with, even the people in your personal life. Learn the lesson.

Note: Googling Ocean Marketing will provide the whole story, I don't want to post a bunch of links because I don't want to violate any forum policies, but if someone gives me the okay, I'll post them for the full story.

I read that yesterday and laughed when I herd he went under. Sometimes I feel like this when dealing with my ISP. It makes me wonder how they stay in business by treating their customers so poorly.

WOW. I googled this Paul Christoforo guy and he's already got a Wikipedia dedicated to him. Amazing FAIL.

Lol what an idiot!!

I had an encounter like this on the phone a few weeks ago with my ISP. I told the idiot i was driving and i couldnt give him the account number right now becuase it is at my house,, The guy had the nerve to tell me that driving while on the phone is ILLEGAL! I told him its called Bluetooth haha

It just keeps going. Christoforo has to be the worst businessman alive. After all this went down he told the company he'd only give them back their email, website and twitter accounts back if he got "a contract written on his terms and substantial compensation, both immediate and for as long as the company continues to exist."

The company promptly went public with these demands. He's now lost further clients and had nothing but bad publicity tied to his name.

There is a lesson here: Do not mistreat your customers and business partners. Your success relies entirely on you providing a great service, if they don't get their service from you they can and will find it somewhere else.