Top 5 reasons why The customer is Always Right is wrong - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Top 5 reasons why The customer is Always Right is wrong - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog When the customer isnt right for your business One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the companys operation. In fact, she became known as the Pen Pal because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint. She didnt like the fact that the company didnt assign seats; she didnt like the absence of a first-class section; she didnt like not having a meal in flight; she didnt like Southwests boarding procedure; she didnt like the flight attendants sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere. Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwests customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herbs [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: This ones yours. In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.' The phrase The customer is always right was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to: Convince customers that they will get good service at this company Convince employees to give customers good service Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim ironically because it leads to bad customer service. Here are the top five reasons why The customer is always right is wrong. 1: It makes employees unhappy Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around From Worst to First, a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim the customer is always right didnt hold sway at Continental. In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Heres how he puts it: When we run into customers that we cant reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees . . . We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When its a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on? You cant treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them . . . If they think that you wont support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment. So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers, where the always right maxim squarely favors the customer which is not a good idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees. Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. But trying to solve this by declaring the customer always right is counter-productive. 2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage Using the slogan The customer is always right abusive customers can demand just about anything theyre right by definition, arent they? This makes the employees job that much harder, when trying to rein them in. Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keep them coming back. 3: Some customers are bad for business Most businesses think that the more customers the better. But some customers are quite simply bad for business. Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story: One of our service technicians arrived at a customers site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer. When hed finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customers contract. Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. 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. 4: It results in worse customer service Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second Put your people first and watch?em kick butt. Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because: They care more about other people, including customers They have more energy They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with They are more motivated On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that: Employees are not valued That treating employees fairly is not important That employees have no right to respect from customers That employees have to put up with everything from customers When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: corteous on the surface only. 5: Some customers are just plain wrong Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows: Herb Kelleher [] makes it clear that his employees come first even if it means dismissing customers. But arent customers always right? No, they are not, Kelleher snaps. And I think thats one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We dont carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, Fly somebody else. Dont abuse our people.' If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethunes book From Worst to First: A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passengers child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kids father and asked him to put away the hat. No, the guy said. My kid can wear what he wants, and I dont care who likes it. The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendants duties. The guy better put away the hat. He did, but he didnt like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasnt hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didnt want to see him and I didnt want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means well take him where he wants to go. But if hes going to be rude and offensive, hes welcome to fly another airline. The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service. So put your people first. And watch them put the customers first. Related posts If you liked this post, theres a good chance youll also enjoy: When is it time to leave a bad job? Find your quitting point. The cult of overwork Why ?Motivation by Pizza? Doesn?t Work Top 10 reasons why happiness at work is the ultimate productivity booster NB: This is a re-run of a previous post while Im away from the blog for a day. Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related Top 5 reasons why The Customer Is Always Right is wrong - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog When the customer isnt right for your business One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the companys operation. In fact, she became known as the Pen Pal because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint. She didnt like the fact that the company didnt assign seats; she didnt like the absence of a first-class section; she didnt like not having a meal in flight; she didnt like Southwests boarding procedure; she didnt like the flight attendants sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere. Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwests customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herbs [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: This ones yours. In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.' The phrase The customer is always right was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to: Convince customers that they will get good service at this company Convince employees to give customers good service Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim ironically because it leads to bad customer service. Here are the top five reasons why The customer is always right is wrong. 1: It makes employees unhappy Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around From Worst to First, a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim the customer is always right didnt hold sway at Continental. In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Heres how he puts it: When we run into customers that we cant reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees . . . We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When its a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on? You cant treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them . . . If they think that you wont support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment. So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers, where the always right maxim squarely favors the customer which is not a good idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees. Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. But trying to solve this by declaring the customer always right is counter-productive. 2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage Using the slogan The customer is always right abusive customers can demand just about anything theyre right by definition, arent they? This makes the employees job that much harder, when trying to rein them in. Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keep them coming back. 3: Some customers are bad for business Most businesses think that the more customers the better. But some customers are quite simply bad for business. Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story: One of our service technicians arrived at a customers site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer. When hed finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customers contract. Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. 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. 4: It results in worse customer service Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second Put your people first and watch?em kick butt. Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because: They care more about other people, including customers They have more energy They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with They are more motivated On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that: Employees are not valued That treating employees fairly is not important That employees have no right to respect from customers That employees have to put up with everything from customers When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: corteous on the surface only. 5: Some customers are just plain wrong Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows: Herb Kelleher [] makes it clear that his employees come first even if it means dismissing customers. But arent customers always right? No, they are not, Kelleher snaps. And I think thats one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We dont carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, Fly somebody else. Dont abuse our people.' If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethunes book From Worst to First: A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passengers child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kids father and asked him to put away the hat. No, the guy said. My kid can wear what he wants, and I dont care who likes it. The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendants duties. The guy better put away the hat. He did, but he didnt like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasnt hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didnt want to see him and I didnt want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means well take him where he wants to go. But if hes going to be rude and offensive, hes welcome to fly another airline. The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service. So put your people first. And watch them put the customers first. UPDATE: This post has spawned a great discussion here and one some other websites. Digg One of the consistent back up statements of The Customer is Always Right is the amount of dollars it costs to replace a customer. It costs more to replace a customer than to retain one most times. However, it also costs a lot more to recruit, hire, and train a new employee than it does to keep one happy. Kinkoids Unite a site for Kinkos workers In my region, when an employee is mentioned in a customer complaint, he/she has to apologize to all 11 center managers in a conference call whether they were wrong or wronged. AdultDVDTalk (huh?) Unfortunately though, most companies in the customer service arena no longer even teach the basics of customer service. They just assume that it is a common-sense thing. Having spent 20 years interviewing job applicants, I can also say that there is no such thing as common sense! Just take a look at the high school and college grads showing up for job interviews in jeans and tee-shirts or chewing gumor my favorite was the young lady who excused herself to answer her cell phone and carry on a brief but totally unnecessary conversation! Reddit On a very, very small number of occasions in my various service roles over the years, Ive asked customers to leave the establishment because they were incorribly belligerent, hostile and abusive, and flat-out refused to accept any attempt to satisfy them. In these cases, the people were shopping for a fight rather than a commodity. If you liked this post, theres a good chance youll also enjoy: When is it time to leave a bad job? Find your quitting point. The cult of overwork Why ?Motivation by Pizza? Doesn?t Work Top 10 reasons why happiness at work is the ultimate productivity booster Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related