My Problem with the "Customer is Always Right" Culture

Two years ago, while working in the telecommunications business, I had the following encounter with a customer.

I was helping out a female customer with a problem she was having with one of mobile phone subscriptions, a legit problem, I forget what. She was clearly extremely shy, she seemed to have problems "confronting" someone about the issues she was having, even though they were absolutely legitimate complaints. I did my best to help her out. Behind her, next in line, was a guy who, during the entire time I was helping out the girl, was looking at his watch, pacing back and forth, making faces and generally doing everything he could with his body language to signal out to me that he was frustrated and in a hurry. I noticed this, but I took my time with the customer I was helping, since the problems she was having with her billing required me to dig a bit deeper into the systems.

Suddenly, the man behind her just cut in, saying "This is taking too long, I'm sure you can take care of my issue first, I'm in a hurry".

I looked at him for a moment and replied: "Absolutely not, in case you missed it, there's a line in here, and I'm helping out someone else right now, you can't just cut in". This absolutely infuriated the man, who went on this tirade about being a paying customer and wanting to know who my manager is and this and that. I noted that the lady I was serving was also very much a paying customer and that he had bad manners, so, out of principle, I was even less inclined to make an exception and let him just cut in like that. I felt especially bad since the well-behaving, shy and clearly introverted girl I was serving was noticeably intimidated by the situation.

I finished helping her, as the man backed off, and when it came time to help him out with his issues, he flipped his lid and said he was going to get me fired and whatnot. Luckily for me, I happened to be able to show him the weekly e-mail we get of the monthly sales our area did, and point out that my name was at the top, after me there was a huge drop off in volume. I noted that "That's my name right there, and those numbers indicate my sales, as you can see I've closed double the amount of sales the guy below me, and that basically means that, no, you're not gonna get me fired".

Mature of me? No, not in the slightest. Do I regret it? Also no.

This did lead to my boss giving me a speech the following week or so, and I also received a warning. Now, as I described above, I was pretty good at what I did, so I actually already had a handful of these warnings, from similar situations. The funny thing is that even my boss noted that he agrees me, off the record. "Off the record" being the operative phrase here, since, of course, he couldn't officially agree with how I conducted myself.

This is what brings me to today's topic.

I've heard that the original meaning of the phrase "The Customer is Always Right" had, in fact, nothing to do with arguments with customers. It simply meant that if a customer wanted to buy a book to use as a paperweight, he was correct in seeing the book as a paperweight, since the product that he was willing to purchase was whatever he saw as being valuable to him.

Later on, the slogan has morphed into this monster that gives otherwise well behaving human beings basically free range to insult and to throw whatever kind of verbal trash towards people doing customer work, to act like petulant children, to mega evolve like a Pokémon into this fierce ogre, something barely even resembling a human being.

It'e easy to see why this is: customers are the lifeline of any business, and businesses need the customers' money in order to stay in business. Most people stop right here, because they don't see a problem. If a person can't handle annoying customers, he or she should do something else with their time. Right? Well, speaking as someone who's been successful at his job involving customers, but still feels like there is a problem, I disagree. So, this isn't coming from some bitter ex-employee who couldn't cut the mustard.

It's not unlikely that a customer has a problem of some kind with the products and/or services of a business, and to make his problems known, he goes on an aggressive rampage towards whoever is the unlucky winner of "Sh*tty Customer Lottery" that day, and when this happens, all manners, maturity and basic human decency gets thrown out the window, when the customer worker gets called an asshole, his mother is a whore, his dog should die and his house needs to burn in a fire and hopefully the devil himself eats his soul in the afterlife, which the customer hopes comes soon. And I've been there, trust me. For a number of years now.

This begs the question: why is this? Is the customer just an asshole? Do a lot of people suddenly realize they have cancer, their significant others cheated on them with their best friend and that the slice of pizza they were saving from yesterday is gone from the fridge by the time they get home, as soon as they walk through to doors into the store?

Personally, I doubt that. I think even the most frustrating horrible pieces of human garbage customers are just human beings, like you and me.

The problem is that for such a long time, the "Customer is Always Right" mindset has incentivized people to act like d*cks whenever they are faced with dealing with a problem they have with a product.

Case in point: customer Dick Dickinson feels like his mobile phone bills are too high and he demands his bills to be reduced. He all but throws things when explaining his problem to the store worker. It turns out that he's been calling porn lines, without understanding how the billing works, but also being quite unable to decipher that it has, in fact, been his own fault all along, when the gravity of the situation is attempted to be explained to him by the customer server. Contrary to what the logical outcome of the situation would be, which would be the customer realizing that he needs to take personal responsibility for however he chooses to use his phone and that the company has not made an error of any kind, since it's his job to check the billing of any service that he chooses to use with phone, he concludes that the customer server is an assface, decides to take whatever else kinds of verbal jabs at him, get personal and yell and scream that he will cancel his subscriptions and never come back.

What matters is the last part. This is what triggers the company to do whatever they possibly can to kiss Dick's ass to make him to stay. Going even as far as giving him a refund on his bills that were completely legitimate. Just to keep him as a customer.

The problem?

Dick has just been taught that acting like a child, cursing at people who had nothing to do with your problem, is what basically gives you almost as much free stuff as Bernie Sanders. Hell, at least with Sanders, you'd get taxed for your stuff, now you're getting everything literally for free.

And that's a real life example, I was there, it happened. And it's not like that's the only example, it happens all the time, everywhere. People have been taught by businesses that acting like a jerk will get you free stuff. There's no reason to act like a normal, mature, adult human being since if you don't yell and scream like a pro wrestler in the 80s on a cocaine trip, you're most likely not getting free stuff. Your problem will probably get fixed, but if you're willing to leave it at that, you're worse off than the moron who just threatened the customer server with a car bomb.

Would you incentivized people in your personal lives like this? Is this behavior you would teach to your children?

If you answered "No" to either, or both of the above, keep reading. If not, odds are we'll never agree on this, so you might as well go on YouTube to watch Boxxy videos, they're really good.

While I understand the mentality that you need to keep your customers happy, no matter what, but being someone who's been involved with this for so long, I can't help but notice something that almost everyone I know who's involved with customers in their jobs: they hate them. They despise them. They want nothing to do with them. Their biggest hope is a work day that either has no customers at all, or a day when they're allowed to say whatever they want at them.

And these are not monsters, or anything. They're not even bad employees, they can do their jobs just fine. They also get along with people outside of work just fine.

But go on Google, or YouTube and type in "Terrible Customers" and you'll get hundreds, thousands of testimonies from people working in retail, people who work in sales, every kind of job imaginable that involves dealing with customers that go are filled with hopelessness, despair, depression, hatred for life, hatred for oneself, hatred for mankind that all seems to stem from the fact that they have to spend hours every day dealing with people who throw endless piles of sh*t at them, and all they can do is smile and say "Yes, ma'am" or "Yes, sir".

"Yes, sir, I should jump off a cliff."
"Yes, ma'am, I totally should call my parents and apologize for being born."

"But do you want fries with that?"

Even though I'm a libertarian and even though the "Customer is Always Right, no matter what" mentality and business strategy fundamentally is something that's naturally born in the market and therefore not "wrong" if you ask most of the hard nosed libertarians, I still maintain that it has negative consequences and is something I have strong, deep rooted hatred for.

Many times I've come across situations where you can see - through experience - that the customer is not even as mad as he's pretending to be. But he treats you like crap because he knows that it's the best way to A) Get the issue solved and B) Get some extra stuff on the side, because the company is so damn scared of losing his 20 bucks a month.

Simply put, what you reward, you get.

If you constantly reward people for behaving like a jackass, they are going to behave like a jackass. It's only logical. It's not even the customers' "fault", per se, it's simply something they've been taught to do.

I can't help but think, though, that if businesses stopped from downright rewarding people for bad behavior, and the overall behavior in these situations on the average work day of someone doing customer work improved, could the overall productivity improve. You know, with the customer workers now being able to function without the hopes and dreams one day having the courage to kill themselves to skip work, and all.

Obviously, you're never going to get rid of all the bad customers. And I'd like to underscore that in many occasions, there's a lot to improve on the customer servers' front, I've been on the receiving end of some terrible customer service, and it's not fun - and even though it's tough, I've tried to maintain a good attitude towards customers, most of the time. I also grown to dislike it when customer servers call a customer stupid at the coffee table, simply because he or she didn't understand something as well as someone who actually works in the field. Gee, I wonder why.

While the customers are obviously the ones who, as the consumers, bring in the money and ultimately keep the company afloat, the workers are also important, and I have seen a lot of talented people move on from a company that I've worked for simply because they got sick of being treated like crap. It's not even that they couldn't deal with negative criticism, they got sick of being told to jump in front of a bus. Every day. I can't help but think that these people could have had a lot to give, if the company's protocol had not been to teach the customers to treat the company's most important asset like a Wham! album. Unless you really like Wham!, in which case just replace that whatever band you don't like. Like Nickelback, no one likes Nickelback. I don't think even Nickelback likes Nickelback.

I just wish companies had a bit more balls and would appreciate their customer service workers more by making it clear that while they appreciate the customers and will try their best to fix whatever problems they are facing with the service, pure moronic behavior towards the workers who bust their ass to make the company thrive is not tolerated, and whoever has a problem with that can take their money elsewhere.

I'm aware of the risk of the rival company then saying "Hey, everybody allowed to be a d*ckhead over here at our company, bring all your moneys!" I think it's worth asking which company the workers would choose. Personally, I know who I would work for.

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@schattenjaeger