Seth Godin argues that when it comes to transient or one-time transactions sometimes it’s better to let things go. It’s a rephrasing of the logic that leads to the tragedy of the commons. There’s another side of this coin. If you treat your jerk customers better than your good customers, eventually some of them are going to work out that they are better off being a jerk.

I used to work at the helpdesk of an ISP and due to some billing error, a group of people that were meant to have a 6 month free trial ended up getting free Internet until the company noticed, 2 years later.

In an effort to recover some of that lost income, we sent out massive back-bills to all of these people. Some of them paid without ever calling. Some of them called. Our instructions were that we should explain to these people why we were hitting them with a massive bill. Then, if they raised any complaint, we should waive it. If they thanked us for the explanation, the charge would stand.

The result was that pushy jerks got their money back and friendly people or people who didn’t bother to call at all (our two favourite kinds of customers in a call-centre) got charged.