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 International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right. 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. Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. They promptly cancelled the customer’s contract. When he’d finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. 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. But some customers are quite simply bad for business.ĭanish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story: Most businesses think that “the more customers the better”.
That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keep them coming back. 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.Īlso, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. 2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage But trying to solve this by declaring the customer “always right” is counter-productive. Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. 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. So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. If they think that you won’t support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment. You can’t treat your employees like serfs.
#CLICK AND SHIP BUSINESS PRO IS NOT WORKING FREE#
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? One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day.
When we run into customers that we can’t reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. 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. 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. Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong. Convince employees to give customers good serviceįortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim – ironically because it leads to bad customer service.Convince customers that they will get good service at this company.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: In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. They bumped it up to Herb’s desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’ Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people.
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. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint. One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. When the customer isn’t right – for your business
0 kommentar(er)
