Can you remember your toughest customer? Chances are, the experience involved some sweat, maybe some tears, and a few extra cups of coffee.

When you’re dealing with people, there’s no rulebook. A rational approach doesn’t necessarily evoke a rational response. Learning to tease out the nuances of interactions with difficult customers and untangle the right solution takes time, thoughtfulness and skill.


In the most extreme situations, though, firing a customer is the solution. But it’s one you have to leverage sparingly and discerningly to yield positive outcomes for your business. With a rigorous approach, you can save your company time, money and heartache in an otherwise impossible scenario.

The catch: There are no boilerplates for this big call, so we spoke to several experts to tap into their wisdom.

When to consider firing a customer

Firing a customer is a radical act, but there are times when it’s necessary to protect your team. With a measure so extreme, it’s important to clearly establish what merits a firing.

Challenging customer support interactions happen all the time; almost always, though, there’s a nugget of gold at the heart of a customer’s feedback and their experience of your product or service. The majority of these criticisms can contribute to valuable insights, whether they’re given constructively or not. It’s a company’s job to separate the wheat from the chaff, or in our case, important feedback from plain old negativity.

When you fire a customer or client who’s giving you tough insights, you miss out on all that value — not to mention you’re setting a dangerous precedent. Michael Redbord, the General Manager of HubSpot’s Service Hub, cautions that firing should be an absolute last resort:
“In our world, ‘firing a customer’ refers to cases where we, the vendor, proactively introduce the concept of terminating the relationship to the customer due to extreme outlying circumstances not covered in our Terms of Service. There could be extreme cases of cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) overrun that you failed to predict, far outgrowing a solution so that it's best if a customer finds a new provider or a sufficiently awful working relationship with the humans of your company that warrants it. But these should be extreme cases that crop up rarely, and are statistical outliers by all measures!”