The customer is ALWAYS RIGHT…ever hear that before…only a million times probably.
There are 2 issues with this statement…
First…if we put a group of business owners in a room together behind closed doors and asked them who believes this and who doesn’t, the room would be divided. It has always been a controversial topic. There are many who would clearly and passionately support that this is not a true statement.
Second…even if you are in the group that believes this statement to be true, then the real question is, “are you living this inside your organization?” Once again, the actions of the organization fall well short of them saying this to their employees and customers.
So what’s at the core of these issues? One key issue is the customer. More often than not the problem starts with having the wrong customer in mind so this statement doesn’t really work. We are offering apples to someone who wants to buy oranges. We are serving a ‘high-touch’ customer with ‘low-touch’ processes. We are organized around our product/service rather than the customer. We have a culture that is not ‘customer centric.’
Allow me to give you one of the simplest answers you could ever find to help lead you to more success in dealing with both issues. FIND THE RIGHT CUSTOMERS AND OBSESS OVER THEM.
Life is much simpler and easier and a lot more fun if you are working with customers who are right for you and your products/service and experience. When you designed your products/services, you had some specific customers in mind. Hopefully you developed “Personas” around these customers (if not we should talk soon). These were the customers you knew were right for your products/services, right for your company, right for the experience you wanted to deliver, and right for helping you grow the organization. But then something happened…
A customer showed up with money falling out of their pockets and wanted to buy your product/service. Seeing the money, you probably said, “Well they aren’t exactly our type of customer, but they have money so let’s work with them.” HUGE MISTAKE.
This is a customer that will probably never be happy or cause you and your employees much more work and much more grief. This is the proverbial ‘bad apple’ in your customer mix. As you work with them you realize their demands are greater/different than what you are designed to deliver. If you don’t deliver these, they are unhappy and you can’t make them happy…unless you ask your employees to do things that you didn’t design and now they are unhappy. And even worse, these “wrong” customers go out and tell others how awful you are to deal with…a lot.
This is a slippery slope…and one you almost always end up sliding all the way down to the bottom. It is a dangerous place to live when it comes to your customers and your organization. Mostly bad things happen when this starts.
For example, you will start changing how you treat your ‘right’ customer because you have to for the ‘wrong’ customer. They notice and start to realize you aren’t really there to help them the way you were. Or…you start adding the wrong processes to your organization to be able to serve them. Or…you ask your employees to do things they don’t understand because this isn’t how they planned to serve the ‘right’ customers and now they are confused, unhappy, and deliver a poor experience to every customer. Or…you change so many of the processes to serve them that they become your primary focus to try and make them happy and your ‘right’ customer ends up getting frustrated and goes somewhere else.
Have any of these happened to your company? Are any of these the way you would like to run your company? Do any of these sound like fun? They aren’t. And I see this all the time with the majority of leaders I talk to in one form or another.
But it doesn’t have to be…you can actually live the mantra that “the customer is always right,” when you have the “right customer.” And these two issues go away when there is a specific, ‘customer obsessed’ strategy to make this happen. Obsessing over the ‘right customer’ is pure joy inside the company and people are happy to find ways to help the customer in the ways they need. It becomes the culture of the company, not something you have to do…it’s something you want to do and are excited about doing.
The customer IS ALWAYS RIGHT…when it’s the right customer!
