Is the Customer always right? My answer would be “No, not necessarily…”
Marc Karschies (CCXP/CXPA RTP)
?? Managing Partner | Customer Experience (CX) & Service Quality (SQ) Strategy | CCXP and CXPA Recognized Training Provider | KCA Consultants
“The customer is always right” is a mantra often preached by service experts and middle or senior management. However, the realities of the business world look different and we all too often forget that companies and customers have different viewpoints and perceptions. But True Customer Centricity and Managed Flexibility in the customer interaction processes could bring both sides closer together.
Imagine you are arriving at a customer meeting first thing after a long weekend and the conference room is feeling very cold (air conditions over the weekend are often not yet set based on employees actually in the office, thus first day of the week is usually much colder in the offices). Several of the other participants seem to feel the same shiver and you take the initiative to call building maintenance to turn up the heat a little. After some temperature measurements, the friendly and eager maintenance person (who took only minutes to come by) cheerfully announces that the temperature in the room is "in fact 18.3 degrees, well within the acceptable range of 18-24 degrees set as standard for the building".
The sales deal that was supposed to be negotiated did not get accepted by the customer's VP. In addition to being cold, she was discouraged by the observed inflexibility of the organizational standards, even though maintenance was operating on impressive standardization and consistency (ISO9000 anyone?) and the maintenance person displayed friendly behavior and quick turnaround.
Who was right? The shivering customers and employees, or the organization that was adhering to internationally accepted standards?
Both are right and equally wrong. Customers often shift into emotional perceptions and feeling state when facing a situation that is not meeting their expectation (aka Customer Experience/CX), while organizations tend to remain in the tangible fact based domain by adhering to set standards and refer to initially accepted Terms & Conditions to be able to retain consistency, efficiencies and controls through structured processes (aka Quality).
What went wrong? For one, the standards were not necessarily set based on customer needs and expectations, but rather based on “industry best practices” and organizational capabilities. But also the communication and customer focus by an engaged, but insufficiently empowered and guided maintenance employee chained to non-customer-focused standards (“nice does not cut it” is often a statement by customers describing this situation).
What we could learn out of a simple example like this (experienced in many variations around the globe all the time) is many fold:
- Organizational standards need to be aligned to customer expectations, not to organizational capabilities and restrictions
- Frontline staff has to be aware that fact based company systems might differ from emotional perception levels of customers. They need to be empowered, equipped/trained and most importantly feel comfortable to operate and take decisions in the grey area beyond restrictive policies, especially in complaint or perceived service breakdown situations (or at least know when, how and whom to escalate to make such decisions, hopefully better aligned to customer needs and expectations)
- Referring to some internal policies or even the terms and conditions (T&C) the customer might have signed without reading years ago (and possibly have since unilaterally been changed by the organization) does not make the customer change his emotional stance on the issue. It might force him into "contractual submission", but the word of mouth and relationship engagement aftermath will still likely be based on the feeling of having been treated wrongly. Addressing the emotional and experience side is critical in relationship recovery. Usually exceptions to policies can be done, at least on exception basis, so do it…
- Most organizations do not have an efficient and effective methodology to mine this highly valuable treasure of information. I am not talking about the 80% most occurring issues, but the ones that most impact customer relationships and business, especially for your most loyal and valuable customers. We have to accept that Issues will always happen, but hopefully our customers are loyal and engaged enough to tell us about it and let us put things right, prevent it from happening again and learn from any such situations. We just need to be ready for it and not hide behind our policies or T&C but see the opportunities within...
Understanding your customer and the power of experience and relationship recovery could truly improve our day to day life. Hopefully more companies will not only start treating complaints in the best possible manner, but attempt to resolve the underlying issues in a more customer focused approach.
Did you experience truly customer focused reactions to complaints (not the negative ones, the blogs and social media are full of them, and we should rather learn from positive examples)? We would love to hear your happy endings.
Marc Karschies is Managing Partner at "Karschies, Ceron & Alred Consultants" (KCA Consultants), a boutique Customer Experience and Service Quality Management consultancy and training company in Dubai. Follow us on Twitter (@KCA_Consultants), LinkedIn (Karschies, Ceron & Alred Consultants) or Youtube (KCA Consultants).
{Views expressed are personal}
9 年Many a times, it is right to be product/service centric than to be customer centric. That basically show your love towards the product > customer. Product is the interface between organisation and customer. In a way, we love our product directly and customer indirectly. An example can be Steve Jobs market reading that customer don't know what they want.
Chief Operating Officer, Payments Experience leader, Merchant Acquiring, Operations Transformation, Consumer Banking (ex Citi, Amex, Elavon Inc),
9 年Fully agreed. I think it is also important to manage customer expectation. Delivering service as per promised customer expectation will result in better customer satisfaction and loyalty. An example of that is Amazon shipping where they state delivery in 4-5 days but in most cases the packet arrives in 2 days.
Guiding Leaders, Sales & Teams to Speak Like a Wise CEO - Be A Speaking Genius In Conversations, Public Speaking, Rough & Tough Talks | Career Spanning Over Three Decades | Speaker, Trainer, Coach, Author
9 年Good one... “The customer is not always right”. Most of us are led to believe the customer is always right but you know from your practical experience that this is an absurd thing to say. So, at close analysis I would like to say “the customer is always right in his/her world”. You see the customer has a certain perception of the level of service he/she is expecting. We necessarily are not always aware of this and make an assumption based on experience, company policy and other factors on what the expectation could be. Sometimes, we under value the expectation or their expectations are beyond our capacity. We need to realise the customer is always right in his/her world and we are right in our world. So, there is a miss alignment of thoughts from both parties. The challenge here is the customer or we “assume” the expectations. Remember this word assume is a dirty word and simply means “making an ASS out of U and ME” Please stop being in this state of “assume”. Just be more aware of your customers needs and wants which leads to letting them know the flexibility and limitations of your services/ products. This in turn is the foundation to eliminate the creation of a difficult customer.