Comments on: Sometimes the Customer Isn’t Right

By: DonnaFreedman

DonnaFreedman — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:45:33 +0000

There are horror stories, I know. (My daughter works in customer service.) But the majority of customers don’t make unreasonable demands — as Jim noted, satisfying everyone’s quirks would close down a lot of businesses.
For example, the company for which my daughter works has a high-up-the-chain person look at the most unreasonable complaints. Invariably such people say they’re going to walk, and never give the company another dime of business. And you know what? Sometimes the high muckety-muck will politely write something along the lines of, “I’m so sorry that we cannot agree on a compromise. Your case is clearly a violation of our terms of service. We are always sorry to lose a customer, but perhaps it’s for the best in this case.”
I wonder how many people actually DO walk?
And some customers you don’t want anyway.

By: tigernicole86

tigernicole86 — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:33:00 +0000

I work in customer service. We have some pretty demanding customers who make rather insane demands. For instance, we took on a customer whose program changes every year and they have only recently decided to have the current year and the previous year’s items mix and match. Well had only just recently taken them on in the past 9 months and a lady wanted to return a skirt that she had purchased from their other provider from 3 years ago. She wanted a replacement because the hem had only just come out. She called me everything but a white girl and when I explained that we were the new vendor and had never had any of that year’s pieces, she didn’t believe me and hounded her company to get her money back.

By: jim

jim — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:18:37 +0000

The phrase “the customer is always right” is just a marketing phrase or slogan meant to make customers feel special and not something to be taken literally. No the customer is not always right in a literal sense. My business does not behave as if the customer is always right. If we did, then we’d make no money and our products could be unsafe, illegal or unreliable.

By: Donna Freedman

Donna Freedman — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:42:26 +0000

The customer can’t ALWAYS be right, especially as regards things we don’t understand and have hired professionals to do for us. It’s up to the service provider to find tactful ways to tell us so. (Also to provide Tums for the poor bastards who answer the phones, because they tend to take the bulk of the customers’ ire.)

By: Investor Junkie

Investor Junkie — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:41:56 +0000

The customer isn’t always right. As a business owner I have gotten rid of customers based upon the pain factor they cause us. Meaning yes there are legit reason for a customer to complain and yes we do screw up. I’m referring to the customers that are nasty for no reason are usually not worth keeping (at least in high volume/low cost businesses). It can also be a different opinion on how you manage the relationship. They especially get fired when they are not worth the income that comes in from them. If I’m directly loosing money from the client AND a pain they are not worth keeping. Even if future projects you stand to make money off of them. They are usually difficult to work with. Cut your losses and move on.

By: Wojo

Wojo — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:49:59 +0000

As an architect, I totally agree with this article–customers come to us for our expertise, but there are many times where we have to step in and show them that their wants or needs won’t work due to code issues, practicality, etc. The best architects minimize this by being creative with their designs, but it still happens day to day.

Great example about the doors. As an aside, it’s not only a “standard” in that they would look weird swinging out, but most of the time it’s also a fire code issue (out-swinging doors prevent free-flowing exiting from a building during a fire). In cases like this, when the client is really insistent, there’s not much we can do unless we change the design (for example, putting the doors in small alcoves). There have been times where things get so bad that the client (or we) walk away from the project. Pretty crazy stuff. :)

By: Jackie

Jackie — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:26:00 +0000

Interesting example about the doors; I had no idea why doors open the way do before. In general when I’m dealing with a customer who is “wrong” I take the same approach you mentioned. I don’t think wrong necessarily means wrong so much as it does missing some information.