Or, you realize the past cannot be changed. And the customers who only want to rehash the past, rather than saying “where do we go from here”, are pathological.
If I run a business and someone communicates to me that they are pathological and cannot be satisfied unless I invent a Time Machine, I am not going to be particularly concerned about their outcomes. They’re just not worth it - fire your shitty customers, for the sake of your business and employees.
Only if the number of customers is significant and they are litigious organized and funded.
My point is that any time you have >1M customers, you will have many pathological people whom you don’t want to do business with in the first place. The right amount of “firing your customers” is nonzero. Anyone who has worked in a customer service role has experienced this.
So it's okay to screw those customers because they aren't litigious, organized, and funded?
You fucked over your customers and some of those who were harmed will be rightly furious with you. The solution here is to try and do good by them, not put your head in the sand and treat the them as a percentage!
No wonder people are no longer willing to assume good faith when having to deal with corporations. It's because of people who think like you.
I do think this is an interesting conversation, but would like to request that we remove loaded language like "screwing over" customers.
To me, the primary fact seems to be that Google lost some customers data. We can all agree on that - they should have kept it, but they didn't. They sold a product that, for some number of customers, was defective.
What is their ethical and financial culpability here? To me, if they did their best - if they have industry leading backup/replication technology (which I think they probably do), there really isn't much that CAN be done.
On the customer side - your data has been lost. What should you do in this situation?
My experience leads me to believe that some people, as upset as they are, understand that sometimes shit happens. The other set of these impacted customers do not accept/understand that - they want you to invent a time machine a reverse reality. Barring that, they want your first born plus 10%.
To me, it is perfectly acceptable to tell that second group of people something like this: "I am sorry this happened, despite our planning and efforts. It sucks. We cannot fix it. However, you are also a toxic customer - moving forward you should look to another company to fill those needs."
At the very least, firing those customers will help with your line-employees' quality of life. Yes, shit happens and it sucks - but there are a lot of assholes who only make a situation worse. No matter what you do, you will never make them happy, and trying to make them happy will have great cost.
Those "pathological" customers, I have no problem telling to pound sand.
So it's never OK to intentionally screw customers. But when bad things happen, are people looking for the best available resolution? If not, let them go be jagoffs somewhere else.
Google should definitely refund them some amount of money (both good and bad customers). For the pathological ones, it's a nice way of saying "it's worth paying you to go away".
Most people who know me wouldn't describe me that way. All I'm saying is that some customers are pathological and you'll never please them, so don't try. Put those resources into your healthy relationships.
If I run a business and someone communicates to me that they are pathological and cannot be satisfied unless I invent a Time Machine, I am not going to be particularly concerned about their outcomes. They’re just not worth it - fire your shitty customers, for the sake of your business and employees.