The Customer Isn't Always Right

Just read an amazing blog post called "Two Phrases That Destroyed American Culture and was blown away. The two phrases are "the customer is always right" and "you have to earn my respect."

The claim of the author is that those two statements have been used by generations of jerks to treat other people with rudeness, disrespect, and even outright hostility. And she provides examples of seeing this occur.

I know that in my years in tech, I've had to deal with my fair share of customers who were acting like utter buttwheels. While it takes a special kind of jerk to abuse someone to their face, it seems that the fact that you're typing to a screen instead of talking to a person brings out that inner asshole in people who wouldn't dare behave like that in public.

Quite often, I had to write the response I wanted to write (the one explaining the huge errors in their logic and the failure of their parents to raise them with any semblance of manners), then erase it and write the response that would get past my manager if it ever ended up in his in-box.

But in most cases, though I couldn't tell the customer off, I could say "sorry, but there's nothing I can do to help you" when there were plenty of things I could do. And if the customer was being quite the buttwheel, my manager wouldn't give me grief over it. I was usually the de-facto manager of the service where I was answering helpdesk mails and unless my manager really felt strongly about something, he didn't second guess me.

So, how much help most customers got depended on how civil they were. If you were nice, polite, and asked for help rather than demanding it, you usually got more help. Basically, I put "treat others as you'd like to be treated" into practice for them. If they treated me well, they were treated well. If they treated me poorly, they were given a polite brush off.

I've heard of government employees who have actually said something to the effect of "I could have done more to help you, but because you were such a roaring jerk, I'm going to do the minimum required of me." But in regular business, where it's easier to get fired, you just have to be satisfied with the knowledge that you were an instrument of karma without being allowed to crow back to the customer that they just reaped what they sowed.

But back to the blog post that got me started on this. I wanted to point out that the reward of coupons is not limited to just the jerks, and it's also not all it's cracked up to be.

The cheese on the cheeseburgers at McDonalds gives me the trots. So, when I order a burger at McDonalds, I order it without cheese. Problem is that when you get it at the drive through, then get it home, going all the way back over a 99 cent burger seems futile. But since a McDonalds that had messed this up twice is on the way back from my son's daycare, I stopped in to ask them to be more careful.

The manager was very understanding and gave me a coupon for a free double cheeseburger. It wasn't until I got it home and read the fine print that I found out it was only good at their 24-hour drive-thru between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.

Maybe I wasn't as nice in registering my complaint as I thought.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Dangerous Thoughts, Society.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.