Is the Modern Day Customer Always WRONG??

if a business doesn't make an effort to make me feel as if my business is appreciated, i'm done with 'em. and i'll write to the district manager and tell 'em why. that's why i do not do business with walmart, victoria's secret or best buy. ever.
and several local dentists.
and a couple of vets.
my business is valuable and i don't give it to companies who treat me like i'm interrupting their real work.
khairete
S.

Good customer service should never die, even though so many customers are wrong. My goal and the goal I try to get my people to strive for is to be fair , do our bestto be honest and as helpful as possible within reasonable boundries. I also take the pressure off of same salespeople by telling them, if they can tell the customer is not happy, go ahead and call me, so I can make the call.

A successful salesperson does their best to help the customer, but after more than 30 years, I sure do have a hard time helping some of the most clueless people ever. They have always been out there, but now they demand things to be free, they damage merch. on purpose to get a discount. It amazes me.

I have told a few people, "I am so sorry, we are never going to be able to make you happy. We are sorry we are going to lose your business."

Some people take advantage, even when you try to be as fair as possible. I will not be ripped off either.

I've worked in retail. The customers are seldom right...they feel they deserve the moon. But, in the spirit of good customer service, the sqeeky wheel gets greased, big time. There were a couple of times I followed policy, made a customer upset and then have management give the customer what they want. Policy is established for a reason, but there are always exceptions to any rule, paticularly when angry customers are involved. Of course, if a business has misrepresented itself, then corrections need to be made. But, most often, the store conceeds to the customer, even if they are wrong.

Ultimately, its a balancing act. Some businesses need to be more flexible. Some customers need to be more understanding and realize that the world doesn't revolve around them. It's called personal responsibility. So, that's my 2 cents, whatever it's worth.

Be well, D.

If you've ever worked in retail you would understand what your boss is saying. For the sake of doing good business tho, you should always treat your customer like they are right, even if they arent. It isnt easy. I think it worked much better in the old days, now there's just too many people and everyone seems to be out to get something for nothing. It will give you an attitude after awhile. Customers can be quite abusive and feel entitled.

The thing is... customers now just assume everything should go their way. I used to be a manager in retail, and my new saying is "A person can be smart, but PEOPLE are STUPID!!!"

Seriously though... If the reciept, signs at the cash register, and the sign on the door ALL say "New merchandise may be returned UNOPENED for cash back or store credit. Defective OPENED merchandise may only be exchanged for the same item." (I worked in a movie/music store. It's a copyright LAW that we can't take back an open movie/CD because it's the 'wrong one'... people will take them home, make copies, then try to return the original and get their money back... Not everyone, but the dishonest few have ruined it for everyone) yet customers would come in and get PISSED when we refused to trade one movie for a different one... Is the customer right? HECK NO! They should READ the policies before expecting us to break them.

If the customer is respectful and polite to me, I would always go the extra mile trying to help them out, even if it meant bending (NOT breaking) policy a little. BUT if a customer is a jerk, then I am going to stick to policy exactly. (While being extremely polite and courteous. lol.)

Also... make sure you do actually LISTEN to the customer. I have intervened when an employee was sticking to their guns, and the customer was pretty irate, only to find out that the employee would jump to their own conclusion about what the customer wanted. The customer really WAS in the right... so make sure that you KNOW for sure what the customer wants. (the employee thought she wanted to exchange a brand new CD because she accidentally dropped it on the gravel outside when she opened it... all she wanted was for us to run it through our resurfacing machine, which was no problem...)

D.,

The customer is NOT always right, but the CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS THE CUSTOMER....I suspect your district manager WON'T BE THERE FOR LONG.

Blessings.....

It's True. I don' t think 99.9% .....but Customers are retarded. The trick is to let them think they are right.

It's why amazon has done SO well...(or one reason, rather)... no dealing with poor minimum wage workers who could care less. Ditto other IRL companies that treat their employees REALLY well.

Seriously, though, it was important to build relationships with customers when your customer base was a few hundred people. Now companies have customer bases of millions of people. Mom&Pop vs Multinationals. Now it's important for companies to build relationships with OTHER COMPANIES.

Of course, in my H's line of work the customer is almost always wrong, because they have no idea what they're talking about (he's in a super tech field... customer says they want A, but they don't they want B... they just don't know the difference because it's all greek to them)

I think it comes back to the 80/20 rule. 20% of the customers may be deranged but 80% of us are treated badly because of it. I think many bad customers are created by the bad service we receive, if the store doesn't care about you why should you care about it? Very similar to what has been created in the housing market by the banks and investment companies - people who would never have dreamt about walking away from their homes are doing it by the thousands because the mindset of the banks is that these are investments where every last dollar must be squeezed out and the human factor has been removed. When banks, stores, businesses in general remove the human factor of their customers, then the customers will start acting less like the decent human beings they/we used to be.

It is general human nature that if we treat each other better we will then become better.

I agree and have wondered the same thing. I get so disgusted when I'm in a store and the cashier is on the phone having a good old time, obviously a personal call and I want to check out. This person looks like I'm bothering them!

One day I was buying some pencils and there was this big pack of pencils that was broken up into smaller packs inside. The price on the shelf said it was a few dollars and it was a LOT of pencils. But that was the sale. It just so happened that the packs inside did have individual bar codes on them. So the person at the register counted up each of the packs inside and assumed they were supposed to be individually marked. But each pack inside had like 4 pencils in them and no one is going to pay 3-4 bucks for 4 plain pencils. They tried to charge me like 30 bucks or some crazy amount. This has been a few years ago so I don't remember the amounts. But it was an OBVIOUS thing to any rational person. I had to argue the point with the person and they were going to stand their ground with me. I had to get a manager because even though I could have just walked out without any pencils, the person would have been trying to do that to people all day long.

Customer service is terrible these days.

I wasn't in retail but I was a programmer for over 15 years and many of our customers (our system users) simply did not put a lot of thought into their requests.
I can't tell you how many times you'd give the customer EXACTLY what they asked for and then they were not happy because what they asked for and what they really needed were not the same thing at all.

Ironically i think that the customer is treated like they are wrong when they are not, and when they are wrong ( and full of it) they are given the world. There are a lot of jerks out there and even more people without manners! I try to be polite wherever i go, or at least start out that way, but if i am treated like dirt i will complain. Not becasue i feel like i should get something but because i want to be heard.
for example, My husband works for a auto dealer, and we get discounted service. He recently took my suv for an oil change, it took 2 days and when we got the truck back every single radio station had been reprogrammed as well as my onstar phone #'s. I was beyond mad, i called the service manager and his response was since i was the wife of an employee it wasnt a big deal and he wasnt going to do anything. So i called GM. Last week i got a handwritten apology from the service dept. An apology was all i wanted all along.

I had a worker in Walmart bakery tell me I had no idea what I was talking about when I ordered some chocolate cupcakes with whipped topping and wanted to pick them up while I was in the store. I do this about every other week and the ladies always tell me if they are too busy or if they can do it in half an hour or so. This girl told me, to my face, that she would not do my cupcakes without a weeks notice, that it was store policy. She also informed me that she had worked in the bakery for over 6 months and had never seen me or she would have told me this before.

I looked her in the face and told her she was incorrect and that I often bought them, about every other week or so and had gotten them within an hour at the most and usually within 15 minutes. She went and got someone else to tell me they couldn't do it and I had my cupcakes in a few minutes. That person said there was no reason I couldn't have them right away, they didn't have any cakes waiting and they had some ready to frost and go in the cooler.

All I can say is "have you every been behind the customer who is RIGHT when you know very well how WRONG they are?" The customer is the customer, but if every one of them is always right, where would your business be then. Too many people looking for a handout nowadays. Not to say that there aren't legitimate RIGHT customers, too. Just many more who like to get a free handout. Sorry, just my opinion.

As a side note to comments, go to http://notalwaysright.com.... there are a lot of funny stories about crazy customers.