Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

Interesting article on customer service

Filed under: Bits and Bytes by Hari
Posted on Wed, Dec 6, 2006 at 12:34 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 20:48 IST)

I'm starting a new feature on this blog -- I'll be linking some interesting articles I find on the web here and provide a bit of commentary on it. I'm generally not a big fan of re-blogging, but it does have its uses. I'd also like some feedback on this kind of blogging from my regular readers.

However, here's my first interesting link: I found this when I was doing a bit of research on the subject of Services Marketing. It's a pretty interesting articles that debunks the myth of the phrase "The Customer is Always Right" and the way it's interpreted by big businesses.

Top 5 reasons why "The Customer is Always Right" is wrong

I must say I agree entirely with the article. Too often, this phrase is interpreted in an absolute sense without a proper context. In my belief the phrase always stood for "The Market is Always Right" and means: whatever product or service the customer chooses (within reason) is the right one. In other words, the customer chooses the product or service he/she wants and not the other way round. It does not mean that the customer has the right to be abusive, disruptive, threatening or generally obnoxious towards employees of service organizations.

Having said that, I believe that service providers who try to cut corners in quality and employ poorly trained or equipped people to serve customers deserve what they get. We all know how much a customer has to endure from poorly trained, clueless Call Centre employees. I believe in such cases, the business escapes its responsibility by putting unprofessional novices in the front-lines to take all the fire.

I hope you find it an interesting read as well.

8 comment(s)

  1. Coming from a Customer Service background in some of my previous jobs, I always hated the phrase, "The customer is always right!" cause 99.9% of the time, that was not the case. I've had to handle customers face to face and over the phone, most think they are invincible over the phone and have a totally different attitude in person in handling situations.People use this excuse to get something for nothing. Priorities given by individuals to themselves is too high in my opinion and they think they are the only customer that is important, putting themselves over the countless others that use the same service, etc.If I ran my own business, I would not hesitate to fire customers for being unruly. I would take care of employees first, then customers. Yes, customers make you money but in a world the size of ours, one person out of possible thousands or millions is a small percentage.But then again, I think 99.9% of the world is stupid with just a small percentage that have any decency, manners and common sense.. ;)

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 00:05 IST #
  2. Oh I loved that article: thanks for the link. Now, do't you think Merryjay above is right? :D

    Comment by Sudipta Chatterjee (visitor) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 07:42 IST #
  3. Thanks for the comments, Drew. I also think the problem is compounded by service departments which hire poorly trained, uneducated people to deal with customers. Naturally customers become highly aggravated by the time the problem is brought to the notice of somebody competent and empowered enough to solve it: case in point being the Call Centres. Many companies try and escape their responsibility towards their customers.Sudipta, the spam has been taken care of. Thanks.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 08:31 IST #
  4. I think you've got the wrong definition of reblogging- the correct definition is: The practice of plagiarizing other blog posts, possibly in an attempt to gain traffic. As it is, it's good to comment on the media- keep them honest, as it were.

    Comment by titanium (visitor) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 17:14 IST #
  5. Thanks for correcting me, titanium. I was not sure of the exact meaning of "re-blogging" but many people also use it to mean randomly linking to other blog content without providing any useful commentary on it. Or rather, would it be called "link farming"?Anyway...

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 17:17 IST #
  6. Don't always blame the incompetant grunt workers working the phones or front desk. I've known many that were really bright people, it's just that the upper management of whatever department they were part of controlled what they could say to customers.When I worked for Time Warner, I could pretty much do whatever the boss could do, I just wasn't given the authority to do such things. It was crazy to think they told us to say one thing to aggravated customers but if it escalated to them, they'd turn a 360 and do what they told us not to, just to please the customer, so they look like the good guy and competant employee. That's bad in my opinion and if the preacher is gonna preach, he should follow his own rules as well, their no exception but that's never the case in retail or tech support from what I've seen.

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 18:09 IST #
  7. I agree with you. In your country it's a different story. Here in India, where cost-cutting is the major factor influencing corporate entities, they prefer to employ under-qualified people in Call Centres just so that they can pay them less.The whole situation regarding Call Centres and BPOs is pathetic, in my view, but that's a different story.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 18:18 IST #
  8. Yeah, seems like some places, only requirement for employment is that you know how to breath :)

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 23:15 IST #

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