Now, rewind to Super Bowl Sunday, where I had a Twitter exchange with who I believe to be the founder of Clarity.

Having just been approved as an expert, I was excited to leverage the power of their platform.

They shy away from company accounts on Clarity and I certainly understand why — people want to talk to a person, not a company. Since I happened to be onboarding a new sales coach at the same time, I began to think about a feature that would help not only my own business, but also those of others.

I was excited to get her using Clarity because she is the best I’ve ever seen at sales and is therefore gainfully employed. She also happens to travel for work 20+ days a month. Her busy schedule means that she is only available for coaching by phone. While I fully trust her to be honest about the hours she bills (and ensuring my company receives its cut for arranging the sessions), I thought of how great it would be if Clarity had a feature where companies could setup sub-accounts for their team members.

I suggested as much to Clarity in a tweet. I figured the odds of it being implemented anytime soon, if at all, were slim to none. I still hoped they would take it into consideration for the long-term product roadmap and thank me for my suggestion.

That is not what happened.

I was so thoroughly put off by the arrogant reply that I immediately deleted my account.

I work with a lot of technology companies and know that there are a ton of feature requests that will likely never be implemented. They still record the suggestions for future consideration. In the case of tweets arriving with feature requests, they treat it like they would any other customer service issue by being cordial in their reply.

In my opinion, the reply I received was anything but cordial. Instead, I felt like I was talked down to like a five year old that had no concept of how things work.

I even tried to talk myself out of feeling the way I did. I told myself that maybe the person replying was drunk at a Super Bowl Party and just having a bit of fun. Or maybe that they have a wicked sense of humor that did not translate well with a wink. I wanted to forgive and figured an apology tweet would be forthcoming. It never arrived.

As a user of both products, I will be talking about them far into the future. I will have nothing but great things to say about one, and nothing but bad things to say about the other.

The lesson here is treat everyone with kindness, even if they’re suggesting something you’ll never do. Especially be kind if the conversation is taking place in public. You never know if another founder will come along and kill that same user with kindness and remind them of your unpleasant exchange.

I’d like to end this post by once again reminding my valued readers about how great CloudFlare is. I just have one question for you if you’re not using them with your own websites: Why not?

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