When the phrase, “the customer is always right,” was put into print about 120 years ago, it was a paradigm-shifting tenet of good business. Over the last century, that sentiment has changed, and companies acknowledge that, of course, customers can be “wrong.” Even academics in service fields are calling it out.
“No matter how frequently it is said, repeating that mantra does not make it become reality, and service employees know it,” said a leading services marketing textbook, referring to the dysfunctional customer behavior for which the sector is notorious.
As the old, binary mantra falls apart, the answer isn’t necessarily to throw it out altogether. David Karandish, founder and CEO of support automation platform Capacity, noted that it’s probably a useful assumption with which to start.
After all, customers will always be centric to CX practitioners’ work.
Instead, the task at hand is how to incorporate nuance. Human emotions sit on what Karandish called a "continuum." A customer could be anywhere from happy to mildly annoyed to abusive. Different levels of customer temperament require different processes. And while most interactions won’t require a drastic response from the customer service agent, the CX team should be equipped to handle any spot on the continuum.
“Yes, ‘the customer is always right’ is a good general working principle,” Karandish said. “But there are exceptions.”
Protection from dysfunction
The cost of not making exceptions to that principle can be significant. Dysfunctional customer behavior can incur significant direct and indirect monetary costs, ruin the experience of other customers, and be psychologically damaging to employees.
“Service businesses, in particular, often use the term, ‘emotional labor,’” said Dwayne Gremler, a marketing professor at Bowling Green State University and co-author of the textbook. “But it's hard to calculate, if you're trying to put into dollars and cents, what that really is.”
Consequences can be seen in workforce activity, if not monetarily. This year started with customer service worker shortages growing, due in large part to burnout. Jeff Gallino, founder and CEO of CX platform CallMiner, said his company even prevented a client, a healthcare provider, from a walkout, as discontent grew among customer representatives due to the emotional labor asked of them.
This client was a believer in “the customer is always right,” which manifested as a no-hang-up policy at its contact center. The policy was part of a broader customer satisfaction program at the company, which allowed patients to score agents and be routed back to those they rated highly. One man took advantage of the system, calling the same female agent every day to harass her. Because of the policy, she couldn’t hang up. And because the patient started each conversation under the guise of a healthcare case, it invoked HIPAA and prohibited the agent from acting further.
It was technology that finally caught the abuse, Gallino said. Platforms aren’t bound by HIPAA, so when the listening software alerted Gallino’s team to the abuse, it was able to cut out the sensitive information and present the abuse to the client. After that incident, the client began using software to flag inappropriate language in real time, put the call into a queue for evaluation, and give the agent the option to end the call.
“It quelled a rebellion,” Gallino said. “That's what we were told, that the agents were getting close to basically just walking out.”
Worst day or average day?
As a final protective action, businesses have the power to sever customer relationships completely. This is sometimes referred to as “firing” the customer.
In 2007, telecommunications company Sprint/Nextel terminated the service agreements of about 1,000 customers for misusing the customer service line so frequently that it was costing the company more than it was making off those customers, according to an example from the textbook. In another example, the owner of a bike shop kicked out a customer for belittling one of his workers, telling the customer to spread the word about the incident in the hopes of keeping others like him out of the shop.
The customer eventually apologized and asked to be allowed in again. But not every customer will repent as the bike shop customer did.
Gremler warned there are likely consequences to firing customers, such as reputational damage and lost revenue. Making an incorrect judgment call and firing a customer on wrong or incomplete information could be costly.
In that context, sentiment analysis and other tools that flag certain behaviors, while useful, are not necessarily the best arbiters of whether a customer is acting “wrong” or “right.” In fact, Karandish would caution against using technology in that way. Not every case is going to be as clear as Gallino’s example.
“I think the question is, are you meeting that customer on their worst day? Or are you meeting that customer on their average day?” Karandish said.
But if a customer does go from one level on the continuum to abuse, Karandish said, “I think AI technology can absolutely pick that up.”
