Always Right?

Do you have some customers or customer types who constantly try your patience? Where’s the line between catering to customers and letting yourself be misused?

In last month’s Better Business story, Drew Denmon shared a number of thoughts about how you and your vendors might approach your business relationships. It’s worthwhile reading, and I recommend it.

In mulling over his ideas, it might be worthwhile, in turn, to think about your relationships with your own customers and the ethics and courtesies that should apply there. I’m not thinking here about contractors who mistreat customers, because they are by far the minority (and in the end usually get what they deserve).

Instead, I’m thinking of contractors who let customers mistreat them and their people. A lot gets written about customer service and how, especially in a tough economy, people need to keep customers happy. But sometimes that pendulum swings too far, to where customers think they have the right to demand anything and everything. As a business owner, how do you deal with them?

To extremes

Some years ago, a national pizza chain known for pleasing customers had a satisfaction guarantee: If you didn’t like your pizza, you got your money back. Talking to a business magazine, an executive of the company told how a store manager treated one customer who complained about the pizza every time he ordered one.

“Because I can’t satisfy you,” this manager said, “I’ll simply give you a free pizza anytime you want one.” The executive actually bragged about this. But where’s the sense in it? Clearly that’s the time to tell the customer, “I’m sorry you don’t like our product, but there are other places in town. You’re welcome to try one of them next time.”

For my own part, I once worked for a company where some of my colleagues had to deal with a difficult client. How difficult? He once got into his car and drove 20 miles across a major city so that he could personally berate an account executive about $16 for long-distance phone charges on an invoice.

This fellow drove his service team crazy. He made work life miserable for them. But did the company owner ever think of cutting him loose? Or at least sit down with him behind a closed door and have a heart to heart about showing his people some common respect and courtesy? No. After all, his money was green.

When is it too much?

The fact is that while you do need to please customers, and probably err a little on the side of doing more than you think is necessary, you don’t have to take abuse, and neither should your people. Just as you owe certain courtesies to the vendors who supply you with equipment and services, customers owe certain courtesies to you.

Unfortunately, amid all the preaching that the customer is king, some people take that all too literally. Those are the people who complain about the price of a job, no matter how fair and reasonable. Who are rude to your people on the telephone and abusive to your technicians in the field. Who believe too fervently in the old maxim that, as the customer, they are always right.

Well, they aren’t always right, and they cross the line especially when they start making things miserable for your people who are trying to serve them. So, what do you do with them?

The quick and simple thing to do is simply cut them loose on the grounds that some customers are just not worth having. But there’s an intermediate step, which goes by names like diplomacy and finesse.

A little disarmament

I remember a time when I mistreated a service person at a home supply store. I was replacing a patio door as part of a remodeling project that wasn’t going all that well, and this store delivered a door that was clearly not what I ordered.

I phoned customer service and had started getting rude when the young man on the other end – obviously well-trained – politely cut me off. “Sir,” he said, “we don’t need this. It’s our mistake, we’re going to make you happy. How can I help?” We resolved the problem, and I left thinking well of him and the store (though he probably still thought I was a jerk, because I had been).

Most of us, after we have an outburst of some kind, are embarrassed. And in that state, we’re willing to see reason. There are ways to cool almost any customer down and build a bridge to a reasonable discussion. Whole books are written about this; you and everyone on your team should have these skills.

But if such intermediate steps don’t work – if you encounter customers who are truly nothing but trouble – by all means cut them loose. Their money may be green, but their effect on your people, and therefore on your business, is poison. Business goes better when common courtesy is a two-way street.



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