Not sure what I'm looking for here other than I highly value the opinion of you folks here.
And I apologize but this is long.
Here's the basics.
One of my jobs as owner of Footballguys is to help as many of our customers as possible be happy with their subscription.
Obviously, the best way for them to be happy is for us to give them the advice that helps them win. That's our basic offer: You give us money, and we'll give you advice to help you win.
The primary way this works in season is we give our customers rankings for players so they can set their lineups.
So far so good.
Here's the problem: We are not perfectly accurate with our rankings.
That seems obvious, right?
But it sometimes looks like this:
A customer is setting his lineup for a crucial game in Week 14. The customer feels pretty good about all his start/bench decisions except for his one starting QB (save the Superflex jokes).
He's faced with a choice between a QB that FBG ranks QB5 vs a QB that Footballguys ranks QB10. The customer starts the QB we rank QB5.
The games are played and the player ranked QB5 posts 20 points. The player ranked QB10 posts 25 points. And the customer loses his matchup by 4 points.
If the customer had started the lower ranked QB, he would have won the crucial game.
We've all had this happen before and it's easy to sort of
![shrug :shrug: :shrug:](/data/assets/smilies/8shrug8.gif)
and say "that's fantasy football". There were a half dozen plays from both QBs that could have easily gone the other way and changed the outcome. Weird things happen. Lucky things happen. Whatever.
That's my fantasy football GM attitude.
But my business owner attitude is much different.
From a business owner perspective, I now have a very unhappy customer. A customer who did what I told them and lost the game. A customer who feels like I did NOT hold up my promise to help them win more. They are a legitimately unhappy customer.
And I totally get it.
That theoretical customer was me this week.
I regularly get emails from unhappy people like this and I always try to answer them in a kind way. I'd talk about how I wish we had a perfect crystal ball and we'll keep doing our best and such. That's rational, of course.
But the reality is, I wonder if that customer (who is maybe not feeling rational) would roll his eyes and say, "I pay you to help me win, and you let me down."
And maybe, back to the business side, they're upset to the point they won't purchase the product again.
Sure, I can tell them our processes are sound. And they are. But that still likely doesn't help them be satisfied. Most customers are bottom-line type thinkers. Bottom line, did the thing they paid for deliver the thing I said it would?
So for you here, I'm wondering if you have thoughts on how to handle this as a business.
The obvious way is just to hope customers accept the reality that sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes bad breaks happen. But I'm sure that will result in a certain number of them failing to continue purchasing.
But the creative part of my brain is thinking how we have less upset customers.
- Maybe we offer something for people who send a screen shot of them losing a game by more than the points their bench QB than the starter we had more highly ranked?
- Maybe a bad beat section of Random Shots?
- Maybe we do a "Where we wrong" column each week explaining the process for key players we missed on.
I truly don't know the answer, which is why I'm looking for feedback here.
And also to add, it's very likely that our competition had it wrong too.
But again, the customer doesn't care about that.
All they care about is they pay us to help them win. And we didn't live up to that in their eyes.
We have to be super careful to understand the question here.
It's not, "Is Footballguys better than ____________?"
It's, "Did I receive value for what I paid Footballguys and did they deliver on helping me win more?"
That's hugely important for us a business to be clear on the distinction.
Ok. That's enough rambling. Would love constructive feedback and real suggestions if you have them. Thank you.