Alex Kjerulf provides five reasons why the 1909 saying, “The customer is always right” is wrong.
He cites Danish IT firm ServiceGruppen as evidence of his third reason that some customers are bad for business:
One of our service technicians arrived at a customer’s site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer.
When he’d finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly canceled the customer’s contract.
Alex comments why this is a valuable case study:
Note that it was not even a matter of a financial calculation – not a question of whether either company would make or lose money on that customer in the long run. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right.
Not knowing if said customer present for the maintenance task was the firm’s president or a temp employee, nor if the customer was one who’d purchased thousands of dollars of equipment, should ServiceGruppen’s response be different? Or should behavior always trump lead generation and customer conversion?
Scrolling through 17 months of comments, I observe the latest:
If customer satisfaction is greater then the cost to run a business, then let the customer find someone else to do business with.
But wait. Is that the proper solution? Does there come a time when a customer complaint or behavior is one too many? Or, to portray a customer service best practice from Josh Bernoff, might organizations like ServiceGruppen view their bad customers as “that customer” and not as “John Smith who bought a $10,000 tool and is married to Helen, who paints wonderful ocean images?”
If companies perceived their customers as names, and not numbers in a sales lead generation spreadsheet or customer complaint log book, might there be more happy and respectful customers and less idiots?
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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this one still puzzles me from time to time. I think my past experience bartending makes a judgment call for who’s toeing the “troll line” a bit more intrinsic to my community management style with TypePad. A friend told me today his opinion that no one who doesn’t have a strong backbone will have any true success as an online community manager.
That said, I so very rarely ‘concede defeat’ by ignoring a hostile customer. I really do everything I can to try to win someone over, but there’s just some folks who can’t be pleased. Mostly ‘cos they just don’t want to be made happy. I can’t take that personally even when it’s ALL CAPS LOCK OMFG.
So perhaps it’s not so much that a customer is right or wrong, but a simple ROI – I feel as though a few kind words, which takes me all of 5 minutes, can keep a customer for life. Abusive customers is one thing, but regular intertubes snark? It doesn’t usually bug me too badly. But that’s just me. Some of my best bar regulars were cranky bastards.
New from ginevra: favrd: my 5 minutes in daily LOL’ing
I am huge on customer service. I have worked for free in some instances and it always pays off in the end.
Simply put, customer doesn’t always know the policy a company is running. So some policies may seem infair for them if not explained well. Best thing I think is to give them information that has sense and not giving out company only information.