The customer is always right

Virtually all of us have worked customer service of some form or another and has heard that dread phrase from the mouth of either their boss or their customers.

The saying turned up around the turn of the 20th century in a number of different areas, and for a long time was considered the primary rule of customer service, particularly in a sales setting, that has thankfully changed somewhat these days and I personally haven't heard it used by anyone being serious for over five years now.

It's dumb as hell and even a moments thought can tell you why, if a customer is always right, then when they demand free stuff for problems that are either not under your control or don't actually exist, then by that criteria, you must honor them.

Once when I worked at New Seasons we had a regular customer who was just terrible, picky, irritable, old, I once saw her scrutinizing the differences in nutrition facts on two bags of popcorn for over five minutes, no big deal you say? What if I was to tell you that the bags were the exact same brand, size, and flavor? Pirates booty, original flavor to be exact. We all dreaded her and she without fail came in about five minutes before closing to do her extensive shopping.

One day she came in a day or so after Thanksgiving demanding a refund on a pair of ducks she had purchased, why? Because she did not remove them from the plastic shrink wrap that they had come in before cooking them, plastic, organs, necks and all, in an oven for two and a half hours at three hundred fifty degrees.

This was our fault somehow and she wasn't going to leave without a refund, my manager ended up giving it to her, something like sixty bucks worth of bird wasted.

Now here's the thing, I got no problem replacing people's food if it's screwed up, even if it isn't my fault, this situation has a few things going for it that might have inclined me to be sympathetic, she was old, possibly on a fixed income, therefore can't afford to have wasted money like that, she may have some actual mental problem or been distracted by family or whatever, totally understandable.
But she never said any of that, she came in and was immediately making us the problem, and that doesn't sit well with me.

I'm not usually one to tell people to take responsibility for their actions, all too often that line is used to tell people to get off food stamps and stop whining, or something along those lines, but in customer service you get the most entitled people about it sometimes, and often they use the dread phrase.

When I worked customer service for Sprint we got that a lot, I literally cannot count the number of people who called in upset that their service was shut off for nonpayment, not upset because we overcharged them, not upset because they made a payment and we didn't receive it, just pissed off and screaming because they hadn't paid in literally four months and we had shut them off.
At Sprint my manager didn't use "The customer is always right" rather he liked the phrase "The customer has the right to be wrong" which makes basically no sense whatsoever and I hated it. These guys where entirely wrong, had not even a little bit of grounds for being mad at me, and yet somehow it was my job to make them happy without actually crediting their account or anything, needless to say it didn't  really work too well.

The fact is the customer is very often wrong, the customer almost never knows more than the employee trying to help them and yet with this philosophy they are still supposed to be deferred to. And god help you if you are in a creative field like art on commission or web site design or writing or whatever, I've managed to avoid experiencing that myself, as I am not creative basically at all in that way and have little interest in being so, but man the horror stories my friends in those fields can tell.

Anyway, a primary or two are tomorrow! Also Bruce Springsteen is in town and I get to work that concert, so that'll be fun.