Alternate title: If you focus on a good product and good service, your customers will love you.

I'm in the process of moving banks and happened to notice what I was sure was an errant charge on my account from my ISP. After a bit of research, I found out that my 2-year contract with them had expired. The trouble here is that at no time, did they notify me that it had expired and they didn't auto-renew the contract or even present me with the option. Instead, they just increased the rate for my television service(which I didn't even want to begin with but the service rep told me it would only be a dollar more so I conceded) and put the responsibility on me to do something about it. When I went to try and set right the mistake by canceling my television service I found that the ISP does not allow you to cancel services on their website. You can only add or upgrade services. Cancellations must all be done over the phone.

Now, this is obviously a scam. There's no sane reason for which they wouldn't notify me about an upcoming contract expiration. Since everything about this contract is written to make their lives easier the least they could do is email me. And preventing the cancellation of services over the internet is just dastardly. That's just a cowardly way to try and cheat people out of their money. "Sure, you can cancel but you'll have to jump through several hoops first!" I imagine them saying... And quite frankly this is a terrible choice on their part. Customers wouldn't be so anxious to leave your company for a competitor if you just produced a good product and had good service behind it. The fact that you have to actively deter people from leaving you says a lot about how much you value your customers.

Make a good product.

In the open source community we know that if you don't make something useful, you just won't have any customers. And if you don't do it well somebody else is going to come along, clone your product, make it better and get all those users. When you're making your product you have to think about "what new features would my clients like to see?", "what features can I introduce that my clients don't know they'd like to see?" and as always, "how can I make this better/fix it?". When you work in open source you always want to make the best product possible so that all of your users will get the best experience with it and that's the goal for most of us. Big business needs to learn this hard. If you're contemplating a feature and think "eh... that wouldn't make enough money to really be worth it..." you're doing it wrong. If you have the cash to survive, there is no sane reason to make an inferior product because you're only hurting yourself in the long run.

Have amazing service.

For some companies, the service is the product. In open source, I think the best service comes in 2 varieties:

1. Make everything as easy as possible for your users. That includes canceling their account if they like. Make your site accessible, easy to navigate, brainless to search through and let users leave feedback if they so choose. Business is a partnership and your half of that is to make them happy. In open source we generally do this by creating easy-to-use APIs for everything so that users can get the slightly-customized version of whatever they want with a few commands or clicks.

2. Awesome response to your customers' needs. In open source, we generally cant hire a team of people to answer phones so what we do is document everything and test everything. With good documentation, customers can answer their own questions. With tests, you can create a system to prove at any moment that your product works or find where the bugs live. Respond to your users. Get back to them as soon as you possibly can. Ask them if there's anything you can possibly do to help them. If a user calls with a problem and you help them right away, they remember that. If you take too long or don't help, they remember the problem, not the service. This is a very important point for me. I've called customer service at a bunch of companies many many times. I always remember the "nice" companies that fixed my problem right away. For the others I just remember that I had a problem and it was their fault.

Think about your users!

Good companies think about and care about their users/clients and how they can provide them with the best experience. This is what drives companies that do good things and that succeed in a user-focused market. Open source people are amazing at this because we all want to build the best products we can and because we care about creating awesome things and sharing them for free. That's not to say you can't or shouldn't make a profit. Just try to think about the people who are lining your coffers and do them a favor here and there. They won't mind spending the cash on you if they like you.

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