The Customer is always right
Michalis Maimaris
Certified Business Trainer | Certified Management Consultant (CMC)
People believe that customer service is a matter of common sense. It is so, why companies within the same industry provide very different levels of service? One Airline for instance earned an 81% customer satisfaction rating. The competing Airline, on the other hand, earned 61%. Stores within the same company may also offer very different levels of service.
What’ s the biggest obstacle to service greatness? Inertia may be the biggest reason companies don’ t provide better customer service. The reason? If you don’ t know there is a problem, there is no reason to do anything about it.
Many times we hear the question: ‘Are customers always right?’. Right or wrong, the customer is always right.
Any company, therefore, should introduce customer-friendly policies and insist on high quality products and services. Above all, treat employees much better than any other employer. This is because there is a direct correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.
The customer loyalty agency TARP Worldwide estimates that 20% - 30% of customer dissatisfaction is a result of the customer making an error or having unrealistic expectations. And because customer believe that they are always right, they assume that any problem is automatically the company’ s or employee’ s fault. Therefore they don't accept their share of responsibility.
In such case customers will be angry, upset and unreasonable. That’ s why employees often feel stuck when fielding a complaint from a customer who is obviously wrong.
The solution is to create generous, customer-friendly policies that make it easier for customers to be right. In addition companies should train employees to avoid placing blame when a customer makes an error. Their focus, instead, should be to find a solution. In any case employees should avoid arguing with customers, not only face-to-face, but in social media as well.
Emotions tend to overpower logic. If we treat customers well, they will become more loyal. Companies that want to excel in Customer Service should operate by the platinum rule: Treat customers the way they want to be treated.
Commercial Recovery Specialist at Altamira Asset Management (Cyprus) Ltd
9 年My opinion is that customers has rights and obligations.
Owner / CEO / Executive Business Development Consultant & Trainer / Coach
9 年It depends on the sector that an Organization operates. If you apply this to consultative services, you will achieve in most of the cases what customer wants since it is right, but at the end the organisation will collapse. So we have to convince our customers to distinguish between right and wrong first. The same applies in a number of sectors where consultative selling is necessary to sell your products or services.