But the alternative possibility, when running a retail business, is that you blow 90% of your time being extra-nice to existing customers and never get around to building the features that would have attracted new users. It depends what stage of growth your business is at; the bigger you get, the unpleasant reality is that the less important any individual customer becomes.
I definitely fell into the latter category. Of the total time I spent doing customer service, there were about ten people I knew on a first-name basis. They had my personal e-mail address and I'd always respond to them within a half hour, often with a call back.
I never did have good tracking metrics in place for time spent per customer. I was a one-man shop and this was in 2000-2003, so there were limited open source options.
Customer support ate up a little more than half my time. This took away from programming and business development. Of the customer support time, maybe five or ten percent was spent on these ten customers -- and that is out of ten thousand paying customers and a few hundred thousand free users.
I never got a four million dollar phone call, but I also don't know how much these ten users evangelized my services. Who knows -- maybe they were responsible for a thousand paying customers?
There's an old phrase: "I know half of my ad dollars are wasted, but I don't know which half!" Nowadays it's a lot easier to measure return, but I still think we're not at the point where we can quantify good will from customer service.
There are definitely times when you need to make choices; you have a finite amount of time and energy and you can't put all of it into customer service. I too would suggest that spending all your time providing perfect customer service to a few customers is probably misplaced effort.
You can always make sure that all your interactions are as pleasant as possible. That will cost you very little time and will leave a lasting impression.
Today I had my first (and hopefully only) encounter with Dreamhost customer support. I was trialling a setup for a client who was looking to host 3 sites with them. By no means a big account, maybe not worth their time. Because of the way I was treated I will have nothing further to do with them as a company if I can possibly help it. I will never use them myself and I will never recommend that my clients do either. Had they taken the time to offer me courteous support I could have gone away happy and the entire process could have been completed faster. Sometimes you don't even need to be nice, you just need to show some manners.
