This is it, if you ask me. It seems that whenever someone asks me to recommend a mechanic , a dentist, whatever, they come back and tell me "but he's so expensive". Yes, you can find less expensive places but quality and service cost money. Those cheaper mechanics probably don't tell people " I can put a new engine in , but given the mileage your transmission could go next month and it's really not worth putting that kind of money into this car." or "Your sensor is bad, but there's a recall on it so take it to a dealer and they'll replace it at no charge." like mine did.I only check that site out a couple of times a year when people like you remind me of it.
I thought this was awesome;
*(I work at a hospital. Every week, we host an event where volunteers come in and entertain some of the sick children. On this particular day, most of the volunteers are dressed up as superheroes.)
Superman: “Who wants me to see if I can pull a penny out of their nose?”
Child #1: in a wheelchair “Me! Me!”
Superman: doing his magic trick “I’m afraid I can’t. All I could find were all these quarters!”
(Superman magically pulls out a quarter and gives it to Child #1. A few minutes later, Child #1 returns.)
Child #1: “Superman! Superman! I bought candy with the money you found! This one’s for you.”
(At this point, one of two volunteers dressed as Spiderman speaks up.)
Spiderman #1: “Where’d he get that candy?”
Child #2: “There’s a vending machine in the hallway.”
Spiderman #1: “They let you buy candy? That’s not healthy.”
Spiderman #2: “I’m sure the nurses here are aware of what the kids eat.”
Child #2: “It’s true. They’re really strict.”
Spiderman #1: “It’s just not healthy…”
(Meanwhile, Superman is continuing his trick.)
Superman: “…and another one in the left ear, and another one in the right ear. Wait! I haven’t checked your nose for quarters yet.”
Child #3: after Superman’s finished “What kind of candy do you want, Superman?”
Superman: “Don’t worry about me, kid. I’m Superman! Superman can make candy with his mind.”
Child #3: “Nuh uh! I saw the movie!”
Superman: “Oh yeah? Watch this!”
(He closes his eyes and concentrations hard, then pretends to catch something out of the air.)
Superman: “Ah-ha! Chocolate!”
Spiderman #1: “Don’t give her that. They get too much sugar.”
Nurse: “It’s fine, sir.”
Spiderman #1: “No!”
(All of a sudden, Spiderman #1 grabs the chocolate from Superman, throws it on the floor, and stomps on it. He’s clearly out of control and scaring the children.)
Spiderman #1: “Food like that will just keep you sick! They just want you to stay here and keep buying their s****y candy to keep you sick so they can get your money! They just—”
(At that moment, a man dressed as Batman appears with his cape wrapped around him. Surprised, Spiderman #1 begins stuttering.)
Spiderman #1: “Uh… what do you want?”
Batman: in a deep voice “I want this hospital to be a place of hope. I want these children to enjoy their lives. I want the forces of darkness forever beaten.”
(He drops the cloak, revealing the police uniform underneath it.)
Batman: cuffs Spiderman #1 “I want justice!”
(The children all cheer, relieved. A month later, one of the children who has been in the hospital for a very long time is getting ready to leave. When someone asks him what his favorite memory of the volunteer nights was, he says…)
Child: “When crazy Spiderman went crazy and Batman took off his costume and he was an actually real hero and made crazy Spiderman go away!”*
That’s hilarious, Chimera!
Some of the stories at NotAlwaysRight restore my faith in human nature, after the other stories have almost killed it.
the problem is people who don’t understand what “the customer is always right” actually means. It does not mean that every Tom, Dick, and Asshole who walks in the door should get their asses kissed. It means that if you don’t offer products/service which customers (in the general sense) will value, you won’t be in business for very long.
Unfortunately (as the notalwaysright.com site shows) too many jackasses think “the customer is always right” is license to be an asshole.
I’ve heard the addendum, “… so if you’re not right, you’re not a customer.” In other words, be an asshole/cheat/utterly impervious to logic, and you’re going to be told that you’re no longer welcome there.
Some customers are just not worth keeping as customers. Bad customers often crack out the “but I’m spending my hard earned money!” line, but the truth is that very few businesses are so desperate to have one specific person as a customer that it makes sense for them to endlessly kiss that persons ass.
I also tend to agree with WhyNot that the belief in a golden age of wonderful customer service is just the result of looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses. It fits in with the rest of the “kids these days!” type statements that are usually unfounded at best and outright wrong at worst.
A manager I worked for years ago told us “we all know the customer isn’t always right, but the customer IS always the customer.”
At that meeting he was giving us authority to address customer complaints ourselves without adding a layet of “I have to ask my manager”.
As a career retailer I am very attuned to the level of service I receive. I also try not to be a pain in anyone’s ass. Sadly, as a result of jerks and mean people who are trying to cheat some system, I often get the stink eye from CS associates who have lost faith in humanity.
In general, the reason why we don’t have old-timey Main Street expert customer service is specifically due to consumer demand. Consumers love to claim that they seek out good service, and can probably cite a few examples of places or companies they love or hate for the service, but the vast majority of their purchases happen based largely on factors of price and convenience.
Let’s be honest. It’s great to bitch about crappy call centers and uncaring, gum-chewing employees, but does anyone honestly seek out places that have great service for most of even their major purchases? I can say for myself that when it comes to credit cards, I go for the financial rewards over any industry rating of customer service or even personal anecdotes. Same with cell phones, people want the snazziest phone at the cheapest price. Coverage is an issue, too, but in the end very very few people go with service as a deciding factor. I shop at grocery stores based on their location, selection, or price, not because their baggers are the friendliest. And so on.
Good customer service costs money. Not just in training, not even just in paying good wages, but in creating good systems, in creating methods of communication and ways of solving complex problems, in hiring good management, training, documentation, IT support, and many other backend costs for your customer service reps. So, let’s say you have a big company offering some service like cell phone service, satellite TV, whatever. You know you’re going to get a huge number of calls, and you can either choose great, highly skilled reps and basically pay $3 a minute in costs for your front-line calls, or you can hire cheap and cut a ton of costs and pay $1 a minute in costs. Which would you choose? Realistically, everyone chooses the latter because their customers don’t want to pay an extra $5 or $10 a month on their package to cover good customer service. It’s all about the numbers, and little costs add up real quick when you’re a big company.
It’s not entirely bad for consumers either. That’s one of the reasons that consumers pay so much less of their budget for things like food today. It’s way cheaper to shop at a huge corporate store, with huge buying power, and where most employees are part-time and making minimum wage, than it is to buy from Joe the Butcher who spends a lifetime in the trade (and further up the chain, from a local small farmer than a big ag company).
TLDR, you want people to care, you pay for the privilege.
I think a properly run business will treat you with kindness and courtesy until you show your ass, then they have every right to show you the door.
I think it is true you’re just looking at it from the wrong side.
“all our customers complain our prices are too high!”
Sounds like there is a problem with marketing or expectations that needs to be worked on.
“all our customers want to pay with credit cards!”
You’re losing sales over cents, just work the cost of the card into your overall prices and accept them.
The customer is a guest of the proprietor, and both are meeting in the middle to secure a mutually beneficial deal. The customer has a responsibility to respect that he is a guest in someone else’s property.
The proprietor has no responsibility, but it’s in his interest to make his clients feel welcome. But, first, the customer is a guest.
Is it really true that customer service is really a lost art? In gas stations, absolutely, and in minimum wage drone jobs, possibly. But I usually get at least decent service nearly everywhere I go.
Fine, but do you give proper courtesy to your betters, the proprietors of whatever shop you buy crap like gas at?
There are rules. Always, as a customer, say hello deferentially before entering another’s property, or at least acknowledge. Ask, politely, never demand. And so forth. If you are a correct human, you will almost always get the service you require.
Customer tells the grocery store clerk that he only wants to buy half a head of lettuce. The clerk goes to his manger and says, “boss some idiot in produce wants to buy half a head of lettuce only.”
The clerk then notices the customer is standing right behind him.
Thinking quickly the clerk says, “and this kind gentleman said he will buy the other half.”
It is possible that this is because you are not a dick.
I’m invisible. I just know it. 
(Translation: Dang it, I posted that link hours before.)
A saying I always liked was, “The customer may not always be right, but they *do *get an unnatural amount of slack.”
I run a computer shop, we build and sell computers.
You can get a computer alot cheaper than we sell them for, but.
Our price includes delivered, setup, data transferred, hook up your peripherals, and generally get you going. (for home users).
all our machines are rigged for remote when they leave and we will happily pop in and answer a few quick questions, take a look at the scary looking error message, reconnect the wireless printer that for some reason dropped offline, etc, no charge.
Why, because no way in hell am I going to manage to order enough hardware to get the kind of price breaks dell/hp/etc get, I am lucky if I can build a machine at cost for what dell is selling them for.
But you will never get that kind of service from anyone else in town.
I always fund myself amused when this happens.
Just a few days ago I had a guy get flaming pissed off at my sheer audacity…
he brings in computer, bad motherboard, repair estimate too high, machines I build too expensive.
So he goes to bestbuy and buys a machine for $600.
I charge him $49 to transfer his data
He goes home, calls me a few hours later complaining he has no video :dubious:.
I tell him we can take a look at it although he may want to talk to BB since he just bought it there. He brings it to me, and his monitor and all his cables…
We check his machine in, no video coming from DVI port, VGA works fine ( we used vga when he brought it in for data transfer.) His total bill $49.
So he picks up his computer, pays his bill, grumbles about it, and takes it back to BB. They happily exchange it for a new one.
One small issue remains, his data, so he brings it back to me, and pays another $49 for a repeat of his data transfer.
He actually tried to say that restoring his data again was some kind of warranty issue and that we should do it again for free. because I should have realized the DVI port was not working.
I actually got to tell him…you brought me a computer to diagnose, refused my repair or replacement, bought elsewhere, paid me to transfer the data, the machine you bought elsewhere proved faulty, asked me to diagnose the problem on a machine that would have been warranty at BB but you brought it to me even after I advised you of that. Then when you get a warranty replacement based on my diagnosis, I am supposed to redo my previous job for free because the “cheap place” sold you a lemon. He replied “I could have just got the machine from you with all these charges.”
I said “yes, and everything I have billed you for throughout this situation would have been included in my machine price, I even would have waived the diagnostic on the first machine.”
One of the few things I liked about my last boss was that he didn’t believe The Customer Is Always Right, unless the customer actually was right.
(One of the myriad things I hated about him was even then, he might not buy it.)
Sorry Morgyn. I really didn’t noticed you had posted a link to the website, or I wouldn’t have done so.
Glad I’m not the only one who enjoys it 