Devoted to customer service and the principles of exceptional customer services

True or False – The Myths and Sort-of-Truths of CRM

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.

The Customer Is King – Usually

The thing about customer satisfaction is that at its centre is an inarguable truth – Perception is Reality. If a customer isn’t satisfied (even if they are wrong to think that way) then they aren’t satisfied, and there’s little consolation in being right if the customer subsequently takes the contract elsewhere. What that means is that it’s generally a good thing to continually monitor satisfaction levels in a proactive way. Sure we can use complaints analysis as part of the mix, but we must recognise the limitations of this metric – it won’t tell us what most customers are thinking (assuming most customers don’t complain). There is an inherent danger in taking customer silence as a mark of satisfaction. Fact is that most unsatisfied customers just walk, so active monitoring of satisfaction levels may enable you to pick up your problems when they are still small, meaning it’ll be easier for you to snap things back to normal before too many people get p***d off and your business goes into mini melt-down.

So why is the customer only usually king? Well in competitive market environments the customer IS king. They have the power and vote with their feet. Where competition is weak (monopoly situations, think Local Government services, for instance) the customer may just get what they are given. I recently did some work in Romania and observed that many hotels and restaurants were struggling to come to terms with this new power that customers now have. Where some outlets were taking their first tentative steps towards attentive customer facing strategies, some were still stuck in the “take it or leave it” mentality. I suspect they’ll learn the hard way.

You Get What You Pay For – Sometimes

There is a general belief in society that you get what you pay for. If you see two bags of frozen shrimp in the supermarket and one is half the price of the other, then there is generally a good reason for that (in this example usually the make-weight of a hefty water content in the cheaper bag). However the yardstick of price isn’t always 100% accurate for predicting product and service quality because guess what? Not all traders are wonderful, truthful human beings with a strong sense of fair play. Some companies are sales and marketing driven. That means they focus a hell of a lot of effort on the front-end process of getting the worm on the hook. If that involves TV and radio advertising, then these over-head costs will be high, and these will have to be built into the price of the commodity. So you may pay a high price not for a high spec, but to cover the cost of these in-your-face and expensive campaigns.

Also, some companies make false or exaggerated claims. Now this generally will only work as a short-term cut and run strategy as the “great” G.W Bush once famously said “fool me once, shame on you – fool me twice, won’t get fooled again”. Obviously he’s an idiot (and we can only speculate on the proportion of days he attends work with his underpants on back to front) but the point he bravely and comically tries to make is that of “once bitten twice shy”, which is eminently true of customer behaviour.

There’s No Such Thing As a Free Lunch – True

If this were not true then the world would be a truly wonderful place, because we’d be able to get something for nothing and nobody would mind (because it’s free). However the simple economics of life dictate that everything has to be paid for one way or another and so-called freebies are always built into the price. That’s not to say that freebies are a bad thing and something to be avoided, it’s just the way sales and marketing works, but everything comes at a cost. If we all genuinely gave loads of stuff away for free, we’d be out of business in no time. Even that sneaky bottle of scotch to your best customers at Christmas has invisible strings attached. You scratch my back ....

People Are Our Greatest Asset – Rarely

Oft heralded rarely borne out in the way staff are treated. Companies make this boast to make themselves sound noble, brimming with integrity and humanity, but scratch beneath the surface and what do we find? Something else. Surely not! Some of you may cry (if you’ve been drinking heavily or you have missed the early part of the argument), but I ask you one thing – if you have something you truly value what do you do? That’s right, you look after it, you keep it safe, send it to an expert to be lovingly repaired when it breaks, you may even insure it. Does this sound like the staff welfare policy of many companies you know? Now we’re not saying it’s NEVER true, but in such circumstances that it IS true, the vapour trail of loving care would be so clear and strong there’s be no argument. Saying it doesn’t make it true.

Shaun Sayers is founder and CEO of Capable People. You can catch his occasional and random musings on general management themes at Capable Blog. Those are actually his own dogs on the page header.

Photo Credits: Richard Roberson & Jeff Hitchcock