The Customer Is Always Right? Wrong.
Is the customer always right? Does that ultimately really matter? Every business owner or company manager needs to properly understand the needs of the customer because future business depends on it.
Isn’t meeting customer needs really the main factor when it comes to the success of the business?
If you can’t give what customers want, why would they keep coming back? At the end of the day, you’re in business because you serve the customer what they want. Your decisions as a business leader need to focus around customer wants and providing it, will keep customers coming back.
Is the customer really ALWAYS right?
It is a common slogan that “the customer is always right”. That’s just not true. The customer is wrong, a lot. Don’t kid yourself and say otherwise. Customers don’t read instructions, they don’t read Web site service or product descriptions, they follow instructions incorrectly, they break things. They’re often confused. In essence, the customer it NOT always right.
But! The customer is ALWAYS the customer. Wrong customers buy things. Wrong customers spend money. As business owners and business leaders, we want our companies to succeed. Business success involves selling goods and services to ALL CUSTOMERS, the right ones and the wrong ones. Because all customers spend money, we want them to keep coming back, right or wrong.
How much do you REALLY care about your customer?
We all love happy customers. We all love praise and positive feedback. We want to be recognized for the good things being done. All of that good and positive messages can become a trap. We can often get trapped into just loving the happy customer. We love the ones who are just positive, and wish the negative, problematic, complaining ones would just go away.
There is a real gem hidden in those complaints. The complaint and advice we get from the customer is very significant to the growth of the business. The response received from a customer after offering a product or service will help your organization to know the customer expectation and plan on how to improve it.
Negative feedback is the best place to start working to make your organization or team even better. Some people just never complain, they won’t say what bothers them, even if something really does. A customer complaint, expressed to you or not, is an opportunity for a competitor to take your customer. A customer who is bothered by something you do or don’t do, will leave the door open for someone else to try and meet their wants and needs.
Be open to the complaints, the negative feedback, the upset people. Show them you care, ask them to be involved in the process of making things better. Get ideas from them on what would make their experience perfect. Then get to work on making it happen. You’ll make yourself better, your team better, your product, good, or service better. And in the process, create loyal, committed, passionate customers who believe in your cause because they know you truly care about them, not just their wallets.
Right or wrong, you benefit from each customer.
There are so many benefits derived from customer experience management when properly implemented for a business. When you understand your customers’ feelings, aspirations and expectations, you are better positioned to motivate your service care team to perform to expectation. The customer doesn’t have to be right, because ultimately, it’s not about who’s right or wrong, it’s that you win the customer.
Treat your customer the way you wanted to be treated.
Being a good communicator and updating the customer on going bases, should put the customer at ease and stop any negative feedback from customer
So simple and super effective. It’s not hard, or complicated. It just takes organizations committed to creating less “DO NOT” rules for employees working with customers and more “PLEASE DO” rules for pleasing customers.
Whether
or not the customer is right is immaterial.
The only relevant question, is the customer satisfied. As customer
service professionals much of our responsibility lies in educating our
customers. We do this by providing them with the information and options, and
then guiding them in deciding on their own solutions. By acting as customer advocates
we can soothe even the angriest customers and gain their trust and cooperation
in developing enduring solutions
Too many times customer relations professionals get hung up on right or wrong when they should be focusing more on solutions or customer choices. It’s not about right or wrong, but arriving at the solution or resolution of the issue.
As professionals, we should always remain in control of the situation, offering the customer options, choices, or alternatives to resolving the problem shows the customer that we’re there to help. Never settle for a no, give choices or advice based on your experience in working with other customers. It’s an effective strategy to win the customer.
I think your point on gathering feedback from complaints is excellent, but I’m not sure I agree with “Business success involves selling goods and services to ALL CUSTOMERS, the right ones and the wrong ones.” If you have potential customers that aren’t the right fit for your company, you should send them elsewhere. You’re doing them and you a favor, because they’re only going to have issues, complaints, and frustration in the future that you /can’t/ address because they were never really right for your product in the first place.
My2c.
Great point Evan, in this case, you are completely right. No use in trying to lure in everyone when you know that you can’t provide what they need.
My thoughts were more about “wrong customers” as in customers who make mistakes, are uninformed, or just misinformed. They may still be the right customer for you, but are going about the process incorrectly.
For businesses to try and motivate employees by claiming that even when a customer has made a mistake, they are “right” is a deflating motivator because you know that they’re not really right. But, as I mentioned, they still are the customer and with some proper guidance, you can help them along and make the situation right.
If you Google the phrase it’s origination was a haberdashery in London England. English, as they speak it, is much different from what we speak in America. If the customer was all correct, then I guess our right would make sense – but the customer is right to walk in to our shop and shop around – he made the correct choice. While the phrase is a cultural anomaly, right and wrong I agree isn’t what makes customers angry. I think that being overpromised and under delivered is more upsetting.
The customer is always right about how they feel and in the end that is the only thing that matters. If the customer says: “Waiter, there is a fly in my soup”, it doesn’t matter whether this is factually tru or not; the customer is not happy about the soup. The service provider can never deny that fact, wheter there is a real fly or not.
Peter
Great point. In the end, whether there’s a fly in the soup or not is not the real problem. The customer’s perception of your organization or your offering is. If there’s no fly and you refuse to replace the soup, the customer will leave thinking there was a fly and probably spread the word about your fly-filled soup. So the technical right or wrong doesn’t ultimately matter as much as the perception of right or wrong from the customer.
I researched the phrase “The customer is always right” for my book Service Failure, but could only narrow it down to four possible sources. However, all four potential authors I found seemed to intend the meaning as you described, Flavio, and not the literal translation that some people have adopted.
The phrase “the customer is always right” is a twinkie. It’s fluff, high in calories, but devoid of real nutritional value. It’s easy to repeat, easy to memorize, and sounds great in the board room and in training seminars, but has little value when it comes to actual day-to-day customer service practice.
Just ask any customer service professional how many times customer are REALLY right and they’ll tell you. Customers are wrong, a lot. That’s the nature of many customer service inquiries, the customer has messed something up, broken something, lost something. Customer service is many times, really customer saving, or service recovery. But that doesn’t mean that we adopt a bad attitude about service or the customer. I’m simply talking about having a more proper perspective of the nature of customer service. With better insight into service and the needs of customers, we can become better at what we deliver in terms of service.
Hey there! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any trouble with hackers?
My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing several weeks of hard work due
to no back up. Do you have any methods to stop hackers?
#1, always UPDATE WordPress and your plugins. If you have plugins that haven’t been updated recently they are a prime suspect to be hacked. So if development isn’t ongoing then you’ll want to look for an alternative that gets updated regularly.
I also STRONGLY recommend using the WordPress plugin BackWPUp. It’s easy to setup and configure backups. Just create a daily backup of your entire site, then use the plugin to automatically send it to Dropbox. If you use Dropbox, you’ll also automatically download all of your backups to your computer and you’re set.
If anything ever happens to your site, you can quickly be back up and running by restoring your site files. No need to worry about what the bad guys changed or left in place. Just delete everything and start over.