The Customer Is Not Always Right
Introduction
Most readers have probably read or heard the famous saying: “The customer is always right.”
It’s a rule that doesn’t deserve to be generalized — every rule has its exceptions. Over time, customers are becoming more demanding than ever. So: is every customer right? Should leadership always stand on the customer’s side against the employee? That’s the question I’ll answer in this article.
Customers Come in All Types
Customers come in all types: the generous and the petty, the healthy and the sickly, the young and the bent-backed elderly. Your employees will encounter many different types, and rest assured they will encounter the awful type — the one who insults them personally and may even curse them for something they have no hand in. The kind of customer who looks down on frontline staff, assuming they are uneducated and untrained and that if they weren’t failures they wouldn’t have ended up in this position.
Well, you — the business owner — need to set clear, firm boundaries between situations in which the customer is right and those in which the customer is wrong. You should also leverage every past incident in which there was a dispute between one of your employees and one of your customers, turning it into a lesson for all current and new employees during their training.
The Dunning–Kruger Effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unqualified individuals overestimate their own abilities because they lack the ability to compare, judge, and differentiate between competent and incompetent people — or they suffer from an illusion of superiority. The effect can be summarized in Charles Darwin’s famous quote: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
The point is that some customers are afflicted with this effect, and they are extremely annoying when they call to inquire or complain. It’s very hard to convince them they’re wrong, because accepting fault is virtually impossible for this category. The saying “the customer is always right” reinforces this effect on both sides — both the customer and the employee.
Employee or Customer — Which Is More Important?
If you want your employees to respect your company and feel a sense of belonging and pride at being part of it, you must defend them just as you defend your customers. The customer who is wrong needs to know they are wrong, and the employee must respond professionally without disrespecting the customer’s person — if they do that, they’ve done their job. The reverse is also true. So in answer to the question above: both are important, with no preference for one over the other.
Some companies have started embracing a new mantra: employee first, then customer. Although the customer is the source of revenue, an unhappy and disengaged employee will not be able to make your customers happy — you cannot give what you do not have. A management style that forces an employee to submit to the nonsense of a wrong customer will, sooner or later, find itself accepting that employee’s resignation.
Unfortunately, in our societies we often hear and read about employees being dismissed because of customers, but we never hear of cases in which a customer was “dismissed” for mistreating an employee. You cannot imagine the difficulty of frontline jobs unless you’ve held one yourself, and you can never feel the energy and effort required by the person you so casually picture sitting under the air conditioning with a headset on — unless you’ve done it earlier in your career.
How many times do customer service or complaints staff face customers inquiring or complaining about aspects of the service or product that were clearly spelled out in the contract signed between the two parties? Often, the customer will escalate and swear by the heavens — only to later discover the fault was entirely theirs.
Story: A customer calls the regional sales manager to complain about his account manager. He complains that he called him at three in the morning — after midnight — and the account manager didn’t answer. For heaven’s sake, three in the afternoon! Now, the regional manager’s reaction will either rein in the customer’s rudeness or destroy the employee’s loyalty and dedication to the company.
Second story: Personally, I went through an experience early in my career working at a global shipping company. I remember one day receiving a customer who was annoyed about his delayed shipment. I was telling him I would look into the cause of the delay if he gave me the tracking number, and I had a smile on my face. The customer didn’t like the smile and started accusing me of being happy that his shipment was delayed. I told him: “Smiling in your brother’s face is a form of charity.” He kept grumbling and started cursing. I handed the task to a colleague and left the reception area, which I’d only stepped into temporarily to grab some envelopes for another customer I would be visiting that day. Who was wrong, and does the customer have the right to complain about an employee who received him with a smile and promised to solve his problem?
Third story: I once bought a water cooler from an electronics retailer. I got home — it didn’t work. I went back to the store. They tried it in front of me and it worked perfectly. The employee asked me a question that hit me like a glass of cold water in the face: “Are you sure you plugged it into a 220-volt outlet?” Honestly — I hadn’t paid attention to that. I had plugged it into the nearest outlet at home, which was 110 volts. I thanked the employee and went home. I found a 220-volt outlet, and it worked just fine. Imagine the arrogant-customer scenario if it had been someone else, refusing to admit fault, perhaps escalating against the poor employee on the grounds that they had been “subtly accused of stupidity” — demanding the cooler be replaced or they’d complain to the Ministry of Commerce and escalate to anyone with authority. That scenario is entirely plausible. How would the store’s management act if it happened — would they stand with the customer or with the employee?
Want to Read More Stories?
There is a book and also a website (in English) dedicated to collecting strange stories and experiences — but this time, you’ll read the other side of the story, because the author is the employee, not the customer. Most of the stories take place in the United States and Canada and range across call centers, retail outlets of all kinds, service centers, hospitals, and hotels. Readers can find them entertaining, and business owners can learn valuable lessons from them — the stories can be filtered by the industry they come from. It’s worth noting that the founder of the site and author of the book himself went through many of these experiences while working at various places and founded the site to prove the invalidity of one of the most common sayings in the customer service industry.
Closing
I hope companies will keep these facts front of mind. The customer is not always right. If you stand on the customer’s side when they are wrong, and you do so at your employee’s expense, the employee will leave you. I also hope the bodies that protect customers and their rights will, in turn, protect employees’ rights by creating a classification for malicious or vexatious complaints — one that negatively affects the record of a complaining customer — because such a customer takes up the time and effort of those bodies as well as the time and effort of employees at the service provider, all without legitimate cause.
I’d love anyone who enjoyed the article to share some personal experiences they’ve been through, particularly customer service and complaints staff and those working in retail.
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