From The End of Wisdom. This week, the most expensive sentence in business: the customer is always right.
It is the golden rule of sales and customer service, and it is so ingrained that it usually goes unquestioned. That alone is a reason to question it.
Start with the claim that the customer is right about the product. It assumes the customer knows the product well, and often the customer does not. A complaint does not prove that anything is wrong with what was bought. It may come from expectations nobody could meet, or from a misunderstanding of what the product is for.
Now the more expensive half. Run the maxim as actual policy and you have settled every dispute between the people who pay you and the people who work for you in advance, against your own people. The customer who screams at your staff is right. The one making impossible demands is right. Your employees watch you take the other side again and learn the real policy, which is that their morale is worth less than a single sale.
Herb Kelleher built Southwest Airlines into one of the most admired cultures in American business partly by rejecting the sentence outright. As its longtime chief executive, he sided with employees against abusive customers, on the reasoning that a company which lets customers mistreat its people destroys the morale that good service depends on. To one chronically dissatisfied frequent complainer, his whole reply was two lines: “Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.” The airline thrived for decades, with some of the most loyal customers in the industry.
The maxim has relatives, and each one breaks when you test it against real cases. Buy low, sell high: most actively managed funds fail to beat their benchmark indices over the long term, so even the professionals paid to do exactly this mostly cannot. Fail fast: the DeLorean Motor Company entered receivership less than two years after its first car was produced, and the speed of that failure taught its founder nothing that could have saved it. Failing quickly and learning from failure are different things.
In September’s issue on proverbs that contradict each other, the problem was that a saying never tells you when it stops applying. Business maxims have the same flaw. The customer is always right hides a hard trade-off between customers and staff, and the trade-off does not go away because the sentence is short. If a maxim is running part of your business, ask what it costs the people who cannot invoke it.