Aman Aalam

It’s the day of your talk at a local meetup, you have prepared for this tech-talk for over two weeks, and it talks about all the good things your product can do for developers. It takes an hour to reach the venue. You deliver your talk with presentation and live code demo, which is well received overall, and you get off the stage. In the networking session when you’re getting ready to pack and leave, an attendee comes forward, introduces themselves. They confirm if you’re from “that” company, immediately launching a tirade against how some policy, a bug, or a discontinued product feature has completely destroyed their business.

The more they describe their loss, the more they’re reminded of the pain, causing the tones and tension to flare up.

Congratulations, you have encountered The Angry Customer.

This is a customer who trusted your product, perhaps even paid for it, but didn’t get the support or experience they were expecting, and they are livid.

You can find them in-person, or online - in forums, chat rooms, or in emails.

How do you handle that? Let’s explore.

Calm in the Storm Photo generated by ChatGPT

Why it happens

Before addressing the tactics to handle the situation, let’s spend a little time understanding why this happens. Because once you’re able to empathize with the situation, you can come up with your own creative solutions.

While it’s totally possible that the customer misunderstood the offering, the commitment, and the product; Or that they didn’t read a documentation they were supposed to read well - but it’s also possible that your employer is totally at fault.

Still, more often than not, it highlights a few factors that are more inward than outward:

Broken support paths, or unresponsive support systems
The human tendency found in most software programmers is to help themselves get out of a situation that’s impeding their progress. So they will try on their own, as much as possible, to find solutions to the issues they are facing.
They’ll Google or GPT for a solution, try to look for existing issues in your issue trackers, or forums, try to reach out to your support team etc.
Maybe you don’t have public forums or issue trackers addressing myriads of issues others face, or your support takes too long to respond and uses canned responses when they respond.
The anger rises only when the customer repeatedly fails to resolve their issues by all available means, and there’s nothing further they can do while their product and their users’ experience deteriorates.

As an example, try to reach out to GMail or Facebook for support, and see how it goes. Before you say you don’t pay for GMail, the paid customers of Google One have a similar experience - I know because I am one.

Broken docs or inadequate communication
The documentation that is supposed to help the customer isn’t incomplete, outdated, broken, or just doesn’t address this customer’s concerns at all. Sometimes you find that the issue wasn’t technical at all but was related to how the customer’s account was set up, which plan they’re on etc.
Your product’s error message likely failed to communicate the issue better and the customer hit the roadblock.
Lost in the numbers
Some internal decisions, failed to account for the edge-case customers, and that customer was just another customer in the sea of affected user, considered collateral damage by your employer. This interaction is just putting a face to a person who was just a random number in a sheet inside your company so far.
This also shows the lack of communication, along with lack of options that your employer couldn’t provide. Maybe there was no other way either.
Sense of loss
After spending months to integrate your product, if a customer finds that their ability to do business is being hampered by your product, they get grappled by a sense of loss and a sense of lack of control. This culminates, many times, to anger, resulting in such interactions via different channels.

Addressing it Situation

I have been a DevRel practitioner for about 11 years now, and I still meet ~100 people every month in meetups that I host. In my personal experience, the best approaches almost always require non-technical skills to be employed first. Here’s what has helped me a great deal in situations like these, maybe it helps you too or gives you some ideas:

Stay Calm: staying calm helps access the logical side of your brain, so you can think and respond, instead of reacting to the situation.
It’s not Personal: It’s very important to understand that the customer is not mad at you personally, you just happen to be the only person from your company that they could find to talk to. They’re mad at the situation, not a person. It’s best not to be defensive in such situations.
Agree with the grievance, and then try to understand it: They say, ‘the first step to solve a problem is recognizing there’s one’. Once you have realized that the situation is not personal, and you have found a way to stay calm, now you can tackle this. Agreeing with the customer - that the grievance exists, that you can understand why they must be feeling bad, and that the situation is indeed bad - will help the customer cool down.
Take an apologetic, humble tone and demeanour if needed.
Let them explain and vent out their grievances.
When you find a chance, try to understand, in detail, what happened, try to recognize where things might have gone wrong, and think if there’s something you can do.
This helps disarms the person interacting with you and should hopefully put them in a state where you can work with them to resolve the situation.
You may not be able to help right there and then, and a calmed down customer will recognize that. Their problem, mostly likely, wasn’t that there wasn’t a solution, but that there was no communication or education on how to handle it. So you can definitely take the conversation over email or other channels, assuring the customer that you will address it internally and get it sorted.

Sometimes you will never have a solution, in those cases, a simple “I am sorry, I tried my best” goes a long way.

View it as an Opportunity: It is a good chance to take this as a learning opportunity, to understand if there’s something you can do - Developer Communication or Developer Education wise - which can help others from falling into similar situations. Many times, you’ll see that this is a cross-functional learning. These are also rare instances to find out what your teams are ignoring or what is in their blind spot.

Winning back the Loyalty

Customers or user who had a really-bad experience, are the best candidates to be wowed and earn good relations with. After all, you helped them get out of a sticky situation. And if you handled it right, not only do you win that customer for life and set them up for success, you’ll also turn them into an advocate for your products and services.

They’ll tell their peers about how you and your company did take their issues into account, solved them, and promised to implement improvements. They’ll also likely use your product again and again, even if they’re in new roles further in their life.

It will take time, it may not be easy, but In my experience, these are the customers who later become your strongest advocates.

And the angry customer at the meetup? It happened to me in real life.

The issue was a result of a limit my employer had introduced, and I couldn’t resolve it.

But The Angry Customer continues to show up in all the channels of developer support and communication, and the tips shared here continue to help me.