I’ve never worked retail or food service, so I’m only going by what I read at Not Always Right and it seems like, regardless of how wrong a customer is, apparently they are never to be called on it. I don’t get it.
I understand that as a representative of a business, you’re expected to be professional, courteous, and all that, and you expect a certain number of customers to be less than ideal. Frustrations, totally unrelated issues, lack of sleep, any number if things can make an otherwise decent person a real pain once in a while. But some people are just assholes, plain and simple.
Still, I’ve read so many stories where clerks and servers are forced to tolerate all manner of abuse, I assume because of “policy.” So for those who have dealt with situations like this, is there any rule of thumb as to when and how to remove such thorns from your side? Must a manager get involved or can a lower-level employee take any action? Does “upper management” really and truly believe that the customer is always right or some such nonsense?
I’m not asking for stories about bad customers - just wondering about policies and procedures set by owners and managers. I’m guessing smaller, owner-operated businesses might have rules quite different from corporate giants, but I’d be interested in hearing from those who have lived it.
When it comes to large companies with a head office, when a complaint gets to them, their job as they see it is simply to resolve the complaint and make the customer happy. Happy customer = repeat business = more money. Also, it’s not worth having a disgruntled customer spreading bad feeling around - easier to throw them a gift voucher/free meal/whatever to keep them happy and make them go away. Generally, they won’t give a stuff about who’s right or wrong (except in the most egregious cases, of course) - it’s all about keeping the customer happy.
The other thing they’ll do, of course, is log the complaint. The level of complaint will be fed to area managers, who will then take the branch manager to task for any complaints that have reached head office. Therefore, it’s often better for a manager to take the customer’s side, comp their meal, whatever, rather than let them complain to head office.
Of course, none of that applies to small, owner run businesses - they can deal with crappy customers as they see fit. I’ve worked in such a place before, for a boss that took no crap, and it was glorious.
Yeah, I maybe take it a little too far, but I fire a few customers a year. I probably should just politely suggest that someone else might serve their needs better, rather than telling them to GTFO.
Back in the '80s I worked at a McDonald’s. If a customer started swearing, we stopped accommodating. “I’m sorry, I’m not serving you; please leave the restaurant.” Management backed us up on this.
That’s what I do. Nine times out of ten it’s not the answer the customer wants to hear because the alternative = $$$ but that’s what you get when you have champagne taste but possess a Budweiser budget.
(I won’t go into specifics here. The Angry Badger description is apt. It’s that Big Cake time of year again and the champagne/Bud people are out in full force. IT’S NOT “JUST CAKE,” PEOPLE.)
Did you ever read a story about how a company treated someone so poorly that it made your blood boil? Did it make you so mad you swore up and down you would never patronize that company again? There’s a better than even chance that the person telling the story was lying their ass off. Facts were distorted, descriptions are embellished, some things become outright fabricated.
That’s what happens when you make assholes mad at you. Ask any business owner and they can tell you about outrageous lies bad customers have spread about them. Better to just make them happy and hope they move on to someone else.
I first heard “The customer is always right” while reading Stanley Marcus’ Minding The Store back in the 80s, a history of Neiman Marcus and their philosophy for success.
Of course theirs is a high end market with generally a sophisticated, discriminating customer base and that concept will have some difficulty in being scaled down to a lot of other retail and service operations.
If a customer is acting badly, no decent manager is going to want to escalate that situation. If a bad customer thinks it’s appropriate to verbally abuse employees, they might also think that trashing the store or throwing a punch at someone is acceptable.
There are many reasons that a company, particularly a large company, would set a policy of “the customer is always right”. A few:
Customers who feel slighted are more likely to give the company a bad review than a happy cutomer is to leave a good one. The numbers I’ve seen said that a happy customer will tell 1 other person, a mad one will tell 10.
Branding. Large companies want the customer to have the same experience at every location, every time. Blanket policies make that easier to control.
Like zero tolerance rules, it eliminates the need to think. Just make the customer happy.
I have worked in places like that (retail - anyone surprised?), but have been fortunate to work mostly for places that value managers who value and back employees. I, too, have “fired” customers, particularly for abusing my employees. So long as I had a valid reason, upper management always backed me up.
Sad but true. I have seen comlaints about a store whose owner I know - the complaint in question claimed things that happened that are *just not physically possible * at the store’s location, but that is what people on Yelp would read.
In business school, we read a paper that had the contention that something like 5% of one’s customers cause 95% of the customer service problems, and that you were actually better off driving those customers to your competition, so that they’d bedevil them, and drive up their costs, while simultaneously dropping your own.
This would be good in practice, but I think most management types are afraid that they’d misidentify the 5%, and drive off good customers, so they try to accommodate everyone.
It was in common usage back in the mid-1960s. Probably way earlier as well, but mid-60s are about as far back as my recollection of stuff like that goes.
I have to wonder what percentage of bad customers are scammers and what percentage have an overly developed sense of entitlement. Further, I wonder how many of them are just encouraged to behave as they do by policies that cave in to them. And of course, the rest of us end up paying for them.
It does surprise me that anonymous on-line reviews carry so much influence. Whether negative or positive, I’m always suspicious - there’s no way to know the truth or the motive of the writer. On the other hand, if you believe that “everything on the internet is true…”
I’m probably in the minority in that something has to be horrifically wrong for me to complain to management, and even then, I’m not looking for compensation so much as a reason to continue patronizing an establishment. I’ve never threatened or thrown a fit - I just express my complaint and, if I think of it, say what will make it better for me. The responses I’ve gotten have ranged from offers of discounts or partial/full refunds to apologies to barely more than a patronizing shrug - their answer is my answer.
Of course, I’m not an idiot customer. I’m nice, dammit!
I’ll also add, that it probably happens quite often that a customer comes in demanding impossible things and swearing and abusing the line employees and in response the manager politely but firmly backs up the line staff, tells the customer that is not appropriate, and escorts them out.
But how often will someone post that episode on NotAlwaysRight?
It is true that many businesses do try to err on the side of placating customers rather than calling them on BS, but that doesn’t mean that customers are never ever denied anything.
NotAlwaysRight does, in fact, include quite a few stories of unreasonable or scammy customers being called on their BS and not being allowed to get away with it.
I’m reminded of news several years where Sprint fired a lot of their high maintenance customers.. That article made my day back then. I firmly believe that all the big companies like that should have a culling every five years or so.
Yep, those kinds of places are also known as "Out of business’.
Dudes: Have you ever had a bad day? Had to talk to people before the caffeine kicked in? Not feeling well? One time brain-fart? But despite these are you basically a good person, and a decent human being?
So, what is the fucking purpose of pissing off what could well be a great customer who is just having “one of those days” ? One snark and that customer is gone forever. And, they will take all their friends with them.
Sure, there are a few people out there who are always shitty and bitchy. Compared to the number who are decent but “just having one of those days” the number is tiny.
Good Customer Service means that you assume that a client is "just having “one of those days”.
Mind you, in today’s world of computers some business do keep a list of repeat bad customers. Those who complain but dont buy enough to make them worthwhile. Sure, you can ditch those, but remember- they will blacken your name to a dozen people who could be great customers.
I’d like to fire the customers who go for the bulk mailing discounts we offer, then bundle their periodicals/flyers/catalogs with kite string, or rubber bands, or with acceptable strapping, but in such huge ungainly bundles that they’re practically guaranteed to fall apart on our sorting machinery (necessitating individual handling of each mailpiece, and destroying any point in offering the discount).
Except they won’t give me a dream sheet that lets me bid for PMG, the bastards.
