You can't win them all.

Over the last four years since I started my company, I have worked hard to make it better. I’ve tried to make it better for my customers and employees alike.

Of course, I’ve also tried to make it better for myself.

Recently, I was doing some research and found a bad review of my company from a former client. In fact, the word they used to describe the work that we did was, “botched.”

Of course, it is a bit disheartening to know that someone doesn’t like us. It’s especially hard to take it when we really try hard to do right by our customers.

In fact, for this client in particular, we went as far out of our way to make him as happy as we could. We added feature after feature to his website for free in an effort to make him happy… against our better judgement. We coached, counseled and consulted to help him create a product that would work well.

To give you an idea of the struggle we had, one complaint during this process was, “I don’t understand why Flickr, LinkedIn and Facebook can handle photo uploads so much better than you can.”

He didn’t want to accept that his budget simply couldn’t support the feature he was asking for.

We finally realized that we would never make him happy so we had a nice disengagement offer that stated, in part,

We’ll add all the free features we’ve committed to and we’ll help you transition to a new support person. But, after this project is complete, we can’t do any more work for you.

This gentleman had another $15,000 of budget that he wanted to put into marketing and future development with us but we simply said, “We can’t make you happy so we want you to take that money elsewhere.”

Still, this person wrote a bad review and wasn’t happy with the experience.

As we wrap up our fourth year in business, I recognize that we are far from perfect. We have a long way to go to achieve the level of customer delight that I expect from those to whom I give money. In fact, I am quite sure that our company will never truly live up to my standard of service.

With that said, I also have to recognize that I can’t win them all. There will always be those that complain. There will always be those that think they know more. There will always be those that simply will not be happy with any level of service. To those people, I’m sorry I won’t be as good as you want.

To the rest of you… let’s create something spectacular.