Here’s a true, embarrassing story, starring me as The Customer Who Jumps To Conclusions.
The location's Austin, TX, at a lovely restaurant, toward the end of a very decent meal.
The manager stops by our table to check on us. Since I regularly get paid to share my advice on such matters, I decide I'll be helpful and offer the restaurant a bit of that highly-prized advice, gratis.
Unfortunately, I hadn't actually seen the menu my food came from. (My dinner-mates had ordered for the table before I got there.) So my advice ended up being worth exactly what the restaurant paid for it: nothing.
Micah:
“Everything was a delight. The grits, however, were spicier than I would have expected.”
Manager didn’t skip a beat. Doing her perfect Jeeves, she deadpanned:
“Absolutely, sir, I confess you’re right: the ‘Habanero Grits’ do have a bit of a kick to them.”
Of course, this was a gracious way of literally saying “you’re right,” while implicitly saying “Read the menu next time, for better results and less mouthburn.”
Which brings me to the point of this article:
The customer’s always wrong. At least kind of.
Probably not as much as I was, but it is part of the human condition to have incomplete perspective, an at least partially inaccurate view of the situation and the facts.
Being human, none of us ever sees the same situation exactly the same as another member of our species. This reality includes customers and their particular, inevitably partially flawed, perspectives.
The customer never quite understands the situation that has brought on her complaint. Or her portion of responsibility. Or the limitations of your powers as a service provider--that you actually can't reroute a UPS ground package she gave you the wrong address for. She even misreads (rarely in a charitable manner) your intentions as a service provider.
Customers stand on principle, and ceremony, and lose track of their initial complaint in the flurry of ego protection and extraneous issues that cloud their minds. Lose track of the proportion of harm they've suffered compared to all their blessings in the world.
Customers, being non-omniscient, are always wrong, to a greater or lesser extent.
But so are you.
As someone on the other side of the desk/the phone line/the email trail – someone who serves customers – your perspective of the situation is also going to suffer from the limits of your own perspective. From your overly technical, underly-empathic, somewhat self-centered and company-centric view of what the customer is going through, and how blame and responsibility for resolution should be allocated.
(Have you ever had the irrational urge to bite a customer's head off because of what happened with a previous customer--something that had nothing to do with her? Or because she looks like your ex? Have you ever wanted to rush a customer off the phone because you hadn't yet had that sorely needed bathroom break? Then you know what I'm talking about.)
Since you’re both going to be limited in your perspective, “wrong” in your perspective, remember who’s paying whom. And considering this, it behooves you to adopt the customer's perspective, if they're gracious enough to share it with you and give you the opportunity to do so.
When the customer’s really, truly wrong
Sometimes, of course, the customer’s wrongness goes far beyond the wrongish. Beyond what can reasonably be considered a difference of opinion, of perspective. The customer here is objectively wrong in the eyes of the universe: and boy oh boy you can prove it down to the last detail.
This clarity, you’d think, makes the situation easier.
I don’t think so. The last thing you should be doing, by and large, is letting your approach to customers devolve into a “let’s-sort-out-the-facts-and-assign-blame” approach to customer problem resolution.
If a customer’s wrong, please find a gentle way to make this clear, and do so if and only if it is necessary to do so: a complex B2B contract where clarity now is important for future interactions, a safety issue, and so forth.
Otherwise, feel free to enjoy a chuckle amongst yourselves about Mr. Solomon not reading the menu. And keep it at that.
