The customer is always right.
The customer always comes first.
Customer focus is our top priority.
All customers are equal.
We have all heard these statements many times in our business lives and they are all valid statements about taking care of our customers, after all without our customers we would not be in business.
So, why is it that the majority of businesses will give their best customer service to the customers that purchase the most products with them?
If they were true to these statements, they would provide an excellent customer service to all of their customers and they would then be able to more effectively utilize their own resources, not having to differentiate between which customer they are to give the best service.
And why do so many businesses only give discount on their products to customers that spend the most money with them?
If they were true to these statements, they would reduce the price of all their products for all of their customers and then more customers would spend their money with them.
Many businesses express that the customer is always right, so why is it that these same businesses have a customer complaints book?
Would it not make more sense just to stand by the statement and then the customer would always be satisfied and the closure and reallocation of the resources of the unnecessary complaints department would make profitable cost savings within their businesses.
Customer focus is our top priority is usually the statement from the CEO and management team of most businesses, but because it is only the latest marketing strategy, it only gets lip service and the investments are not made to implement it across all their businesses.
And the statement, the customer always comes first, is inevitably a falsehood, because in the majority of businesses, profitability comes first, closely followed by the bonuses yearly allocated to the board of the company and the customer, if they are lucky, come a poor third.
But it is good to know that a select few customers are treated to the real meaning of all of these statements, even though it is our responsibility as business leaders to treat all customers with the same level of respect.
Yes, all customers are equal, but, it would appear that some are more equal than others.
Monday, July 28, 2008
All Customers Are Equal
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8 comments:
Hi James.
I like your blog, and most of the time I agree with you. This time I do not agree with you and have posted a longer explanation at my blog as a response to this post. Read it here
Hi Frode,
Thank you for your comment and I am pleased it created an opportunity for you to write a post in response.
I agree with you that we humans are all different in some way or another, that is what makes the complexity of our lifes so interesting.
And I also agree that not just customers, but employees as well should all be treated with respect.
The purpose of this post was to pose the question as to why it is that so many corporations, enterprises and businesses will express these statements about how customers should be treated, but the majority of them will do exactly the opposite.
These statements are more about customer experience than customer service and if more business leaders thought about the experience they are providing to their customers in their business than the level of service that they are providing to them, then these statements would hold true and respect for both the customers and the employees would be a natural part of the overall interactive experience.
Could it than mean that most companies have a statement that is supposed to look good, but have the effect of creating false promises to the customer? And this will then again lead to unhappy customers, as their expectations are not met? Could we go so far that a public statement can be dangerous? It looks good on paper, but if the effect is that it creates to high expectations you’ll end up with no possibilities to get the customer satisfied? This can be a very interesting discussion. My company had a statement saying that we shall have the best customer support in Norway. Looks good, but if you as a customer do not feel that you got the best support in Norway, you would be a bit disappointed, even if you got great support? On the other hand a statement that says; “We shall have the 3.rd best customer support in Norway” – would not look so good, but it might be easier to meet the expectations? Do you have any thoughts about this? I found it very interesting to reflect on this subject…
Hi Frode,
Now you are getting the point, and yes the public statement is just put up as a slogan with little real intent to either implement it or invest in it within their companies.
To reflect on a subject allows you to more fully appreciate it and the interest grows.
Yes this can be a very interesting discussion, why not make it part of the Leadership Network forum and lets all have a debate on this subject.
The customer experience rarely meets their expectations.
This is a very interesting conversation going on between Frode and James and I could not help but butt in being in customer service for over 3 decades.
I agree that all those grandiose coporate statements about customer services raises the expectations beyond sustainable levels of service possibilities.
The other angle is that while everyone is espousing customer satisfaction and customer rights, nobody is telling them how far does there rights go where is the line drawn.
I come across dozens of incidence ever month, where customer raises non existent and percieved short delivery in customer expectations and starts demanding a compensation. Employees have also been taking the worst possible behavior from many such impolite and unreasonable customers. Organizations too end up spending a packet to satisfy such demands for fear of the customer protection laws.
I think customer education on where to draw the line on their expectations and what are the etiquets and good customer behavior needs to drawn up and written about as the other side of customer service.
Perhaps we see more of it in India as the customers are discovering
Hi, Sri,
Thank you for your comment and for entering into our very interesting conversation, you are more than welcome to join our discussions as this is a subject that needs to have many of the misconceptions put right and a much better understanding and definition of the rules of engagement between the customers and the companies employees.
I would like to pose a question to both of you and for that matter anyone else who joins our conversation, exactly who has set the expectations that the customers have, did they think of them on their own, or has other factors influenced their views?
I do believe that our slogan by it pure self create unhappy customers. I have been thinking a lot about this lately, and yesterday I sent a long e-mail to our marketing manager explaining my point, as we are supposed to have a new 3 year strategy meeting in August. I wrote that the slogan really says that we promise to be Javier Sotomayor jumping 2.45 every time. And if someone comes to watch us jump 2.38 they will be disappointed. If we rather would invite our customers to watch us jump in a Norwegian high jump championship, they would expect us to jump 2.25 – 2.30. If we touched the Norwegian record of 2.36 or even beat it with 2.37 they would be thrilled.
Educating the customers is something we try to do, but if they came already with too high hopes it is hard to get them open for understanding. We do have a set of terms in our contract that all customers need to agree on. These do clearly state the lines, but still the customers expect us to go further, and we need to in some cases to make the customers happy, or else we will lose them to competition. We have an independent organ in Norway that the customers can complain to. In 98 % of our cases we would “win” – We would most likely lose the customer, but it states that we are right, the customer is wrong. I do try to examine these cases to find what we can do better, and a lot of them are demands that go far beyond what we can possible accept.
What I am wondering about now, is what can we do to educate our customers further? We can create a set of rules, or even write an article to publish on our website. But I fear that it would make us look like “cry babies” and customers would run of to our competitors that promise to break Javier’s’ world record? Personally I hate to be right in a conflict with a customer; I try to find ways to meet their demands anyway, because if I am right, the customer is gone...
At the moment the views and comments that are being expressed are coming from the business leader and company prespective, it would be a good idea to have some input from the customers prespective as well.
This I think would make the discussion more balanced and could help to open up the conversation and make it even more interesting.
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