Is the Customer Always Right?

Of course! I have heard the cliché; ‘the customer is king’. I however feel this cliché has led to a lot of customers amassing power and privileges unto themselves. Businesses have also almost learned to bear the rather difficult postures of some customers. I chanced upon a website called www.badconsumers.com, which is dedicated to small businesses (in the US) as a way of fighting back when they are abused by customers and other businesses. Admittedly, businesses exist because of them; if customers do not patronize products and services, businesses will go under. In fact, they will not even exist to start with. Businesses produce, consumers use.

Customer Types

From my experience as a customer and as someone at the other end of providing a service, I notice broadly, 4 types of customers. First are the difficult customers who would want to create, ferment, and fan trouble. They are the types who approach a service provider or business with the look on their faces as if to say ‘I will deal with you whether or not you treat me nice’. Such customers are often very rude and do not give a hoot how they approach or treat frontline and management staff. Others approach a business knowing their limits. They are the types who appear with the ‘I understand your work’ kind of look. These are often very patient people who give frontline folks long ropes to pull. It is not too strange to find some businesses treating such people with less attention sometimes. Some customers are indifferent to what they expect and really care less how they are received. These are the types who may just walk out the door and still come back though the service does not quite suit them. They are indifferent but they know what they need to do and would not act until you push them to the wall. Then there are the ‘I know my right’ types who often turn out to be massive trouble rousers.  These ones can even create their own troubles and expect to trap a business.

Ty Kiisel, a contributor for Forbes magazine, outlines three reasons why customers are not always right. It is worthwhile to reproduce (almost verbatim) what Kiisel said because it puts the whole discussion into a better perspective.

“Customers really aren’t always sure what they want and many times we don’t do a good job of uncovering what they really need”. I’m a huge fan of how Genyo Takeda and his team developed the NintendoWii. I’m not what you would call a gamer and a game station wasn’t really on my list of things I needed to have, but for some reason it was on my wife’s. I think it’s because Takeda took an unconventional approach to building the Wii and came up with a gaming consul that even non-gamers (like my wife) could appreciate.

“This may sound paradoxical, but if we had followed the existing road-maps we would have aimed to make it ‘faster and flashier’,” said Takeda. “In other words, we would have tried to improve the speed at which it displays stunning graphics. But we could not help but ask ourselves, ‘How big an impact would that direction really have on our customers?”

Takeda suggested that had they continued down that path, they would have created another PlayStation and my wife (like millions of others) would have never purchased a Wii. Some of  the changes he made were very basic.

For starters, he replaced the gaming control with a wand that more naturally mimicked the way people really moved. In fact, I think that’s what really appealed to my wife. The Wii didn’t require her to get used to the way the controller worked.”

Takeda changed the world of video games not by asking his customers what they wanted, but by watching how they interacted with each other and the games generally, and then applied it to building a new platform with a revolutionary approach to video games.

I think the same is true for our customers. We need to uncover what our customers really want because they often cannot think out of their

current paradigm to consider something new or revolutionary.

Secondly, Ty Kiisel says that “If customers don’t know the answer, they make it up”. In a nutshell, different parts of the brain process information differently. When patients without a connection between the brain halves (some people are born with this condition and it is a treatment for others with rare neurological maladies) are asked questions, if one side of the brain did not know the answer and could not communicate with the other side, it would make one up.This is relevant to us because subconsciously, if we do not know the answer to a question like, “Do you prefer the red package or the blue package?” we make it up.

This is the problem with reliance on customer feedback. Focus groups (or asking your customers) might be a good data point, but the human propensity to make stuff up makes those opinions unreliable.

“Customer expectations are not always rational”: In fairness, sometimes we

allow and even facilitate unrealistic expectations with our customers. Spinning the real story about a product or service to make it sound sexier than it really is sets up the situation for an unhappy customer down the road. Marketers and sales people are accused of doing this all the time, but politicians have made it an art form. I do not think it matters on which side of the aisle they sit; I only trust half of the statistics they cite.

Even considering all the blame we probably deserve, some customers will have unrealistic expectations no matter what we do.

Some of our customers hear what they want to hear and have unrealistic expectations without any of our help at all: “I thought the fertilizer you put on my lawn would have killed all the weeds in 24 hours!” “My car doesn’t get 10 more miles per gallon after the tune-up you just charged me GHC200 for, I want my money back!” or, “This new suit didn’t get me the job I just interviewed for!”

There have been many times over the course of my career when I have had to sit across the desk or on the other end of the phone with a customer who had unrealistic expectations.

It is never easy and there are even those who have made it a matter of course to complain knowing that most of us will eventually cave in and give them an additional discount or something free to placate them. In that sense, I have remained true to my Father’s direction to always try to keep the customer happy. However, I also have to admit that I have grumbled under my beard at a number of customers and their unrealistic expectations.

Those companies that look beyond what their customers say or what they ask for and spend the time to discover what they really need seem to be the businesses that really succeed.
Just as Ty Kiisel concludes, our customers are not always right. However, having said all these, it is important to realize that customers need to be treated as important as they really are. As already
mentioned, they
 bring in the revenue
needed to keep a
business going. MM