Seth Godin (marketing guy) recently wrote on the idea that The Customer is Always Right. He sums up his opinion with this rule:
If the customer is wrong, they’re not your customer any more.
In other words, if it’s not worth making the customer right, fire her.
At first glance, those of us in internal service roles would be tempted to complain, That doesn’t apply to us. We have to serve our customers, right or wrong; so we might as well assume they’re “always right.”
At first glance, we might think that. And it’s true — we can’t “fire” our customers. We can’t decide to “stop helping” somebody — it’s simply not our perogative.
What is our perogative (as an internal department) is deciding what we will, and what we will not, support.
For example, many workplaces have a policy prohibiting (or at least discouraging) employees downloading and installing software, especially non-work related software (Winamp, Weatherbug, that sort of thing. Some places might be strict enough (and silly enough) to include Firefox — others don’t prohibit anything). Regardless of whether this policy exists or not, it goes without saying that if you are having trouble watching videos in the DivX player, your IT department will politely tell you that they are not going to help you with that. Because you, the customer, are not “right”? Yes and no; but most tech support departments, if pressed, would tell you something like this:
The customer is always right if and only if the customer can tell us how the issue is related to his or her work.
Rather than the standard “customer is always right” adage, I prefer this story about Nordstrom. It’s said that Nordstrom has a one-page employee handbook - a single 5″x8″ card. It says: Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1 : Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.
The Nordstrom name, incidentally, has become practically synonymous with great customer service. Not a bad act to follow.
All I know is, if I try to take the phrase, the customer is always right absolutely literally, I’m going to wind up making all sorts of caveats, collaries, exceptions, what-ifs, and so forth.
If I set out to use good judgement, always… Now that, I can do all the time.
If my judgement is not good, I’m probably in the wrong profession.
I used to work for Nordstrom and I loved that they empowered us to make the decisions in all our dealings with customers. It didn’t make sense for us to go to our managers regarding a situation with a customer because most of the time the manager would give the customer what they wanted anyways!
That’s a great point; every time I’ve worked in a customer service environment, I’ve seen the same thing. When a call/issue gets escalated to a manager, invariably the manager will give the customer what they are asking for.
Like you say, it just makes sense to empower the front-line associate to do what needs to be done.
Thanks for the comment!