“The customer is always right.” Right?

Wrong!

Customers are just people like you and me, none of us are always right (with the possible exception of my wife) so clearly this isn’t the sense in which Harry Selfridge, founder of the prestigious Selfridges department store in London in the early 1900′s, intended to focus his staff on customer service. A noble sentiment but unwittingly misguided and demotivating for staff.

What about if he had said “the customer’s not always right, but he’s always the customer”? Well, sorry but that wouldn’t be right either. It would be a bit like the russian diplomat who said “ those are my principles and if you don’t like them….. I have some others”.

Small business has to move away from the notion that every customer is worth having. The 80:20 rule always holds, 20% of your customers will provide 80% of your profit. So many small businesses relentlessly chase the 80% long tail which is clearly unprofitable, just in case they might one day come good. Well I can tell you that they won’t come good, especially if you persist with the idea that they are always right.

The fact is that customers are not always right and sometimes you have to tell them so.

Savvy small businesses understand that their business is a partnership: with suppliers, agencies, banks, staff and, yes, customers. Strive for customer service excellence but expect in return for customers to play their part – paying their bills, getting their orders right first time, not keeping delivery vans waiting, sticking to promotional agreements, presenting your products to their customers in the right manner and so on. To achieve this they may have to undergo some customer education.

A sure sign of a customer worth keeping is one who responds to your efforts to help them integrate your products/ service into their business, ie a willingness to accept your customer education. If you have spent time and effort trying to turn a long tail customer into a profitable one to no avail, then dump them. You owe it to your business and you owe it to your other customers.

Focus your efforts on the good ones and they will reward you with greater profitability.

What a wonderful world it would be if businesses put as much effort into their suppliers as into their customers.  Everyone would win. And those businesses are out there, you just have to look.

So forget platitudes such as ‘the customer is always right’. Raise the bar and ensure that the customer service ethic is coursing through the veins of your small business from the top of the tree down through your entire workforce. If you worry too much about the long tail, then one day that might be all you have left.

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