Shaun Sayers’ post: “True or False” provides a nice presentation to a sticky issue
The customer is always right – false
It sounds good, but the customer is not always right. That doesn’t mean it’s always super-helpful to tell them that they are wrong, so even when they are wrong it’s good psychology to offer some sort of little victory. It’s just good customer relationship management. Some customers are high maintenance, and some are low maintenance, but one dollar is just as good as another, so we (usually) want to keep them. We also need to ask ourselves “is it our fault they’ve got their wires crossed? Are our user instructions or our terms and conditions confusing?” crucially we need to ask ourselves “how often does this mis-understanding occur?” This is a decent enough yardstick in helping us understand if it’s them that have the problem (which is likely if there are relatively few examples of customer confusion), or if it’s us that’s causing the confusion in the first place (if many customers are getting the wrong end of the stick). But subtlety and good old fashioned good manners go a long way.
Shaun makes an excellent point about making sure that your lack of clarity is not the underlying reason for the misunderstanding. The second point of course is that you can be 100% correct and still face the prospect of diminished traffic. The old cliché “Never lose a customer” is always a winning strategy?
