How to deal with customers who are not right

Remember, the customer is not always right. And, for the sake of your business and your sanity, you need to address a bad customer right away. "The customer is always right" is a motto which exhorts service staff to give a high priority to customer satisfaction. The belief was popularized by pioneering retailers such as Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field. They advocated that customer complaints should be treated seriously so that they should not feel cheated or deceived. So what do we do when the customer is the one, in an online world, doing the cheating and deceiving?

Here are three tips for dealing with a customer who isn't right.

Lessons from the "trotro"

As a young professional, I always get to the bus terminal very early in the morning so as to beat the traffic that comes with the morning rush hour. Usually, the sight is that of drivers’ mates shouting names of various locations to attract passengers.  For me, my business has always been to identify a bus going my way and hop in with the hope of getting to my destination. 

However, my routine with the trotro turned into a class of lessons when I sat in one of the trotros and realized there was a television set installed in it. These were what I gathered from my “trotro” experience. Usually, televisions are found in buses that travel long distances. The reason, I presume, is to help kill the boredom that comes with travelling long distances.