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27 pointschrisleydon23 comments

Rule #1: "The customer is always right: no exceptions".

This is absolutely flat-out wrong. Bad customers will chew up your support time, engineering resources, and mental health.

The sooner it is recognized that some customers are simply toxic, the sooner you can get rid of them. If you fail to even entertain the notion that customers might be wrong, you're doing yourself and your employees a huge disservice.

I can understand where you're coming from. From a support mentality they have to be viewed as being right, although admittedly there are some customers that are probably worth losing in the long run.

The idea behind that point was more to push the team to get things right and go that extra mile to help the customer. If they're rude though then the rule doesn't apply.

From my perspective, customers should be viewed as having great value. This is an entirely different thing from saying that the customer is always right (which by the way contains the additional team-killing undercurrent of suggestion that management will always back the customer over their own employees).

Some customers will use vast amounts of your time and constantly expect you to accommodate them. Especially in a small operation, the customers that cause disproportionate expense are toxic. These are the ones that you need to actively fire, and the assumption that every customer is a good customer (or that every customer is right) quite simply precludes this option.

You're both right.

"Every model is wrong, but some are useful"

While it's technically correct that the customer is not always right. It is useful to push this mindset on employees who directly interact with costumers. Leaving to your employees to figure the gray areas by themselves my cause you a larger net headache than telling them there's no exceptions, when it might not always be true.

This is to be expected. Even for isp bandwidth 5% of the customers use 95% of the bandwidth. But like internet bandwidths, the 5% that use the most are also the most vocal. People communicate and the bigger pain they are, the more they communicate with others.

There will always be those few customers you are better of losing. But I don't think you want to dismiss a rude customer too quickly. I notice that many customers will initially approach a complaint or support need with rudeness/hostility, as they think it is more likely to get attention or to emphasize how much they have been put out. I often find that they can be quickly disarmed and be very nice to work with if you take the "kill 'em with kindness" approach. Don't go as far as to always say "you are right," but let them know you want to help them, even if they are not a delight to work with. These customers can become your biggest advocates.

In my experience, the most toxic customers have been our biggest advocates and salesmen out in the world (yes, men, they're almost always men for some reason, not sure why), but you'd never know it based on the crazy abusive stuff we see in our email box.

The key is treating all customers, even the crazy & abusive ones, with respect and knowing when to cut bait. Staying above the fray and not letting it affect your tone when you respond can be really hard some days, 'cause we're all human, but it's worth it.

I think there's a difference between "the customer is always right" and "the customer gets everything that they want."

For example, a customer calls and says, "You overcharged me!" You look at the account and see that, no, the customer wasn't overcharged. The customer is right in the sense that they have through some influence of factors thought that they were overcharged. Was copy misleading? Was something not clear on one page or another?

There are a couple ways to handle this. One is where the customer is wrong: "no sir, you were not overcharged." and then argue with them until they hang up in frustration. Or you can get to the root of the misunderstanding (unclear fees? they forgot about taxes?) and then possibly choose to offer a refund as a thanks to them for helping you prevent other customers from becoming equally unhappy.

#13 is a tricky one, but important:

Don't be too technical. Gauge the technical ability of who you're talking with and match it.

I can't tell you how many times I've called customer support with a problem that I've done all my homework for the support call and then get greeted by a person who absolutely must follow a script.

You could tell them you restarted the server, restarted the process, etc., etc. but they don't care - they just force the script on you. I get that the first line of support needs to triage the caller before escalation, but annoying them right up front makes the experience very unpleasant.

Great advice, I live by this stuff, so it's neat to see it codified. ;)

One thing I would add - always strive to respond within 24 hours, but do NOT respond in seconds/minutes.

Five minutes after sending, users are often still frustrated and a good number won't read your response before firing back as their adrenaline is still up (also, they think you're a robot because you're too fast and robots can't possibly have the right answer!)--it'll take twice as many emails to solve the problem.

I disagree, at least from the perspective of a customer. One hosting company I like to work with used to answer competently within anything from 10 minutes to an hour and this turned me into an evangelist. The prompt answers also made me a lot more tolerant when the response wasn't correct and allowed another iteration without waiting for another "within 24 hours".

Depends on the use case. If someone's having a dire emergency (or something that's hit a serious block), I answer them immediately.

However, if they, say, can't find a button on an interface, telling them where the button is in 30 seconds or less will yield an immediate firing back: "I already tried that, that doesn't work!!" 60% of the time.

Waiting 15 minutes to even up to four hours to answer the email will yield "Awesome, that works, thanks and thanks for answering so quickly!" most of the time, in my testing.

In fact, each and every time I deal with a difficult customer, when I go back and look at the thread, der, I answered them in under 5 minutes. I like to answer fast, but I have very much found that it hurts rather than helps so very often.

Gotta wait for some of that frustration to dissipate so that they're calm and able to read and follow instructions again. Frustration does not aid reading comprehension - when you're frustrated, sometimes you don't even read the response before firing back! I myself have been pretty guilty of this as a customer.

Whether or not the rule that the "customer is always right" applies is context-dependent. In an educational environment, for example, we can't embrace this principle; it is contrary to our mission to leave people with misinformation that can affect their studies or research.

I think it can be reworded to be useful guiding principle in more environments if you're willing to parse it more carefully. Perhaps something like "The customer's perception is more important than yours."?

I work for an organization with excellent customer support, and I completely agree. It is phrased badly, albeit in the standard way. I'd go even further to say the #1 rule is "listen to your customer" and not make judgments about right or wrong.

If you listen to your customer you will have a better chance of solving the problem in the correct way.

Thanks guys! It's only a version one document at the moment so we can update it with your feedback in the next version.

Agreed. Context-dependent is an important distinction for this rule. Coming from a manufacturing-based business of mostly customized products, if all of our customers were always "right," then we would be loosing a losing a lot of money on replacing/refunding products to customers who ordered wrong, used the product incorrectly or are just trying to deceive us (which is rare). A good approach, in my opinion, is to not make the customer think they are wrong and find a way to amicably resolve the situation. My initial response is to gather more information and say "let's see what we can do to make this work for you." We find it is a good opportunity to show how accommodating we are, even when the customer is wrong, which can make a reoccurring customer out of them and educate them for future orders.

I am sure there are some types of business that would rather take the customer-is-right approach, which may be easier and less costly. And there are also probably times when letting certain customers take their business elsewhere may actually be best.

"The customer is always right - no exceptions"

Well, if I am a customer and I am asking for something stupid I'd rather have this pointed out politely and then let me make an informed decision. Indeed, some of the best examples I've had of customer service is where the salesperson politely pointed out that what I was wanting to buy might not be such a great idea after all.

That's true for certain feature requests, but we're targeting support problems with this particular sheet. It's best not to assume that the customer is 'stupid' and instead see them on the same level as them, it's all about a mindset. If you go in with the customer is always wrong you won't go that extra step to try and help them, more dismiss them.

I've managed a high volume call center for 15 years and I agree with this very much. In my experience, it can be easy to view customers with cynicism. But answering an extreme principle with another extreme principle isn't useful, either.

I think it could be reworded and be more useful (see my comment further down).

One thing I'd add is: Once a problem is escalated, put the customer in direct contact with the higher level support. Triage is fine, but not being able to communicate with whoever is working on your problem is really frustrating.

http://downloads.gosquared.com/help_sheets/12/helpsheet_supp...

Fantastic post, I recommend printing this out and putting it right next to your monitor so it's always there to remind you.

I saved the post instead. Go environment!

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