A really great article
I’ve spent the majority of my life working in customer service in one capacity or another. I came across this article today, and thought it was really smart. So I thought I’d share it.
When the customer isn’t right - for your business
by: Alexander Kjerulf
One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.
She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.
Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’
In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’”
The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:
1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service
Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim - ironically because it leads to bad customer service.
Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.
1: It makes employees unhappy
Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around “From Worst to First,” a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim “the customer is always right” didn’t hold sway at Continental.
In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Here’s how he puts it:
When we run into customers that we can’t reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees . . .
We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When it’s a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?
You can’t treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them . . . If they think that you won’t support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment.
So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers, where the “always right” maxim squarely favors the customer - which is not a good idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees.
Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. But trying to solve this by declaring the customer “always right” is counter-productive.
2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage
Using the slogan “The customer is always right” abusive customers can demand just about anything - they’re right by definition, aren’t they? This makes the employees’ job that much harder, when trying to rein them in.
Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keep them coming back.
3: Some customers are bad for business
Most businesses think that “the more customers the better”. But some customers are quite simply bad for business.
Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story:
One of our service technicians arrived at a customer’s site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer.
When he’d finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customer’s contract.
Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. Note that it was not even a matter of a financial calculation - not a question of whether either company would make or lose money on that customer in the long run. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right.
4: It results in worse customer service
Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second - Put your people first and watch’em kick butt.
Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because:
* They care more about other people, including customers
* They have more energy
* They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with
* They are more motivated
On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that:
* Employees are not valued
* That treating employees fairly is not important
* That employees have no right to respect from customers
* That employees have to put up with everything from customers
When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible - the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: corteous on the surface only.
5: Some customers are just plain wrong
Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows:
Herb Kelleher […] makes it clear that his employees come first — even if it means dismissing customers. But aren’t customers always right? “No, they are not,” Kelleher snaps. “And I think that’s one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people.’”
If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethune’s book “From Worst to First”:
A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passenger’s child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kid’s father and asked him to put away the hat. “No,” the guy said. “My kid can wear what he wants, and I don’t care who likes it.”
The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendant’s duties. The guy better put away the hat.
He did, but he didn’t like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasn’t hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didn’t want to see him and I didn’t want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means we’ll take him where he wants to go. But if he’s going to be rude and offensive, he’s welcome to fly another airline.
The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service.
So put your people first. And watch them put the customers first.
Work Schmurk
A few years ago my husband was in his first full time “career” job after college. Long story short, they screwed him over and laid him off. It was a painful experience.
We’ve spent the past few years trying to heal from our anger at those people, anger at God for allowing us to go through it, from feeling betrayed, and trying to move on with our lives. We took jobs that weren’t “dream jobs”, but that we thought would be good to help us heal a move on. And it has been. We work for a great organization that is very open to all kinds of people (which in and of itself has been healing to meet such a diverse group of people), an organization with high ethics and standards, and that we take a lot of pride in working at. Both of us could see ourselves here for a long time.
Yet for some reason, we’re both open to moving on. Somehow, within the past several months, the place that we’ve come to as a result of years of healing is now being hindered by the very jobs that helped to bring the healing. Is that weird? Does it make sense? We’re now realizing that what we’ve been doing has been perfect for the time we’ve been doing it, but the things that we want to do with the next several years of our life - well, work interferes with it. Be it scheduling, the physicality of it, logistics, etc. The things we care about - our church community, each other, friends and family, and eventually our own family - are all things we have to say “no” to, or at least put off more than we should, in order to “do our job”.
I was talking to someone at my church about this tonight, and he said something simple and profound, something about a time in life where you realize work has to revolve around your life, not your life around your work.
Wow. Afterwards, I thought, “yeah. so?” because it DID seem so simple. And the more I thought of it the more I got it. As we get older, our priorities shift, our goals change - or perhaps they don’t change so much as mold into something different than we thought they were. When we were in our 20s, it was all about being happy at work, making money, finding out who we were. We didn’t care that our scheduling was, essentially, shit, because we still saw each other at home, at least enough (at least we thought that then). We moved to a different city a few years ago after he got laid off and didn’t have many friends so we didn’t realize we weren’t seeing them. We were church-hopping so we didn’t have community. And we were far from being ready to have kids.
All that has changed in the past year. We chose a community to live in, bought a house, have decided what church community to invest in, have made several friends, have a small group, and are wanting kids. We’re in a VERY different place than a few years ago.
Several years ago I tried my hand at an in-home based direct sales business (what woman HASN’T tried some sort of ‘direct-marketing’ job?) I was actually quite good at it, but was at my height when 9/11 hit, and being young, new, and having a young and new team it just fizzled out. One thing I respected about them as a company was that they taught their consultants: “God first, family second, career third”. As a woman in my early 20s I thought, “that’s nice” at the time, but didn’t realize WHY that philosophy was so important. Now I do. Because now, if it means I can see my husband, friends and family more, volunteer at organizations I care about more, then it doesn’t matter to me as much what I do with a “measly” 40 hours of my time a week.
So a lot of this may seem like rambling of learnings without an end point, and if so, that’s okay. Any of you ever gone through this? Any thoughts? Advice?
for the love of our pets
oprah. God love her.
so last week oprah sent lisa ling undercover to do a story on puppy mills. i will admit, i DVR oprah. i figure those days where there’s nothing on then i’ll have a couple episodes to watch, and chances are, whatever her show is about is worth watching, unless she’s discussing a book i’m not reading, some celebrity i don’t care about, or something like that. probably 4 days out of 5 days i think it’d be worth watching.
now, as of yet, i’m not a dog owner. we haven’t graduated to the responsibility of kids or dogs. (we’ve actually heard kids are easier than dogs - ha!) we do have cats, and i’ve always been someone who cares incredibly for animals. that whole, ‘they have no voice so we should be their’s’ type of thing.
so i was STUNNED, actually that’s quite an understatement, to find out what goes on in these mills. i mean, first of all, the very phrase “puppy mills” just reeks of cruelty and degradation. but to see the hidden camera shots was heart-wrenching. i used to drag my husband into pet shops in the mall, and i’d goggle over the cute little animals there and want to take them all home. now knowing what environment they come from, how their mom was treated, and what kind of environment their first 6-8 weeks is, i’m disgusted. plain and simple.
something the guy on there (my apologies for not remembering his name - he’s the one who rented out the billboard to get her attention and everything) said that i had never known before, was how the people who run puppy mills view dogs. most of the puppy mills are located in pennsylvania and ohio, which hits pretty close to home, in largely amish communities who view the dogs as agriculture or livestock, as most would consider pigs or cows. they are people who are shocked that people allow their dogs to run around in their home.
anyhow, i was glad that oprah did a show on puppy mills, and opened peoples’ eyes to what goes on inside.
for more info, visit:
www.hsus.org/pets/issues_affecting_our_pets/get_the_facts_on_puppy_mills
geez
does anyone else feel that michael johns was robbed? he shouldn’t be out of the competition by now.
and how the hell is kristy lee cook still in the competition? how does someone get in the bottom 2 for like, 6 weeks and then not even make the bottom 3 the past 2 weeks?!? she has NOT improved that much!
ugh. she needs to go. seriously.
American idol sings “shout to the lord”
i am unashamedly an american idol fan. i watch it religiously. like, i’m more likely to skip church than miss an episode. boy do i love DVR.
so what do you think? i haven’t decided yet whether i think it’s cool or weird, or a little of both. i think i need some public opinion.
although i definitely have my thoughts on it, i’ll hold off for your thoughts first… 
here’s the video…
the “devil’s” music
did any of you who grew up in a really conservative church ever have to watch these videos about how satanic rock music is? where they’d play records backwards to prove that they were satanic, or talk so much about how all the music was about sex or drugs or murder? they’d basically try to scare the hell out of you and convince you that all of that music is horrible - have any of you seen these? my husband and i, who grew up in entirely different cities, distinctly remember being shown these videos in junior high youth group.
the beatles, who many of the above video-makers might not even consider harmful, had people who used to burn their albums in protest of this horrible rock & roll music. nowadays, i realize and recognize the importance of the beatles, and highly respect what they did for the face of modern music, but when i listen to them, realize that they were quite simplistic in style and presentation in comparison to current music. i mean, they just stood there, a la the “that thing you do” movie, and sung. and girls SCREAMED. did the same with the beach boys. what?!?
even tipper gore once headed a group against this “crazy” music called “rock & roll”! anyway…
i spent my life growing up listening to contemporary Christian music - 4him, steven curtis chapman, dctalk, newsboys, audio adrenaline, etc. i used to get all self-righteous that this music was “just as good” as the stuff my friends listened to, but this music was less likely to get me put straight in hell.
THEN, when i went to college (a christian college, actually), i was given a CD player for graduation, and went and got my first CDs: alanis “jagged little pill”, the cranberries, and a couple others. as someone who enjoys listening to various types of music, and sees the values in many styles (seriously, i’ll listen to anything from gangsta rap to bubble-gum pop to jazz to folk), i realized that i had been living in a musical bubble. sure, not everything alanis sang about went smoothly in with my belief system, but what she said resonated with me. and i began to realize these artists were simply describing how and what they were dealing with in life, and it RESONATED with people. i was one of those people. it was a dumbfounding realization.
after learning more about the history of music over the course of today, it’s become clear, from the mouths of great artists, that they write largely as an outlet for what they think, feel, are discovering, wondering, etc. good grief, that’s the way music has been FOREVER. even david, the psalmist, wrote for this reason. that is what music IS. it’s poetry, or prayers, or thoughts, or journaling, set to music. sometimes with words, sometimes without.
so what i’ve realized is, i grew up in this bubble of not even knowing what people thought. “people” meaning those who didn’t come from my closed-off conservative way of being. it was astounding to realize what “real” people were going through and thinking, and what they related to. so no, maybe not all this music is exactly uplifting, or does it set a great example, or does it encourage people to do good things. but rather than being taught discernment when i was in junior high and high school, i was just sequestered from the “real world”. even now, there is music that i will refuse to listen to because it’s message is not one of positivity, and i have enough negativity being thrown at me than to absorb more in the form of musical poetry.
and oddly, nowadays, i don’t think i have ANY “contemporary christian music” on any playlist on my ipod. most of it doesn’t speak to me anymore. they all seem to sound the same and say the same thing. or they sound like ripoffs of non-christian music. i just think there had to have been a different way for me to learn this discernment at a younger age, no?
to spawn or not to spawn?
ah. the question.
my husband and i are, i think, the last of our college friends who are not yet parents or soon-to-be parents. being married as long as we have, without having yet spawned, sometimes raises eyebrows. people want to know why. do we hate kids? are we just selfish? what are we waiting for? don’t we want to help raise the next generation of world-changers? (or for the overly religious, “don’t you want to raise warriors for Christ?” um, no. i don’t.)
ugh.
i don’t think people always stop to think that those people who may be sans kiddos may not always have a choice in the matter. i realize that by the time you hit your 30s the opportunities to have kids significantly diminishes. again, not necessarily something everyone has a choice of in the matter.
sure you could get all stephen covey “be proactive everything’s a choice” on my ass, but i would politely give you the finger, ignore what you have to say, and turn and walk away. because, you see, i’ve spent the last several years of my life battling a medical condition that while not life-threatening, can certainly lead to things of that nature if not taken care of and definitely affects the having children thing.
so while several of my friends would get pregnant if they were in the same room as their husband it seemed like (read - didn’t even have to try), or spent months or years paying for a drug to keep them from getting pregnant, i on the the other hand am just damned unlucky.
it wasn’t until recently that this bothered me. i think when i hit my 30s i realized i was on a time crunch. i realized i didn’t necessarily want to live my life without children. i wanted the joys of hearing kids laughter or get hugs from my own kids. i wanted someone be there for my husband if something were to happen to me, or vice versa. i realized i DO give a shit about the future of this planet, and sure, i want to raise a kid or two who will also care, and who will exhibit integrity and compassion in a world where both seem void all too often.
so in the meantime, the past decade has been an evaluative study of how everyone we know parents their kids. there are things we appreciate about each one of our friends and family members in how they love, discipline, and build up their kids. we’ve also seen a hell of a lot of stuff we don’t so much agree with. but we don’t judge, because we’ve not yet experienced life in their shoes. we just kind of take notes, realizing that there’s probably no way in hell we’ll remember any of it by the time we have kids, or adopt kids.
so share! what’s your parenting advice/story? or your non-parenting story?
