Oh yeah, but thank goodness, not many!
Liquid Audio, in collaboration with a select group of repairers and retailers, manages a list of people who, for various good reasons, will not be assisted by any of us, ever again. We add to this shared list as needed (+1 absolute noodle in 2022, +1 in 2023), but the fact is we enjoy fantastic relationships with 99.9% of our customers. The list is short and new additions are extremely rare.
Liquid Audio is one of Australia’s most trusted repairers and I’m very proud of that because it says everything about our approach. We attract great customers, but as every business owner knows, you cannot please everyone, no matter how well you run a business, nor should you ever try to and I certainly don’t.
I prefer not to work with aggressive, entitled, unreasonable, rude or disrespectful individuals as a general rule. That being said, there exists a further subset, a small fraction of people so unreasonable, problematic and difficult that attempts to work with them must be avoided, even if it causes short-term financial loss to get rid of them. That was our +1 in 2022.
We can accept small financial losses because life is too short. For the miscreants, there is a bigger price to pay and my colleagues and I have a simple zero-tolerance policy for dealing with them:
If someone does the wrong thing, assistance is terminated, details are recorded and shared, and they are permanently banned from our network.
If/when somebody is perma-banned they lose access to all the best repairers in Perth, no matter which one they upset, forever. This suits us of course, but it doesn’t work so well for the banned.
