Sales Laundry

Archive for April 17th, 2009

NOTE:  This article was written by Alex Kjerulf on his site PositiveSharing.com.  It is a point of view you don’t hear very often and worth the read so I tacked it on the wall here.  

When the customer isn’t right – for your business

One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.

She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.

Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’

In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’

The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:

1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service

Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim – ironically because it leads to bad customer service.

Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

1: It makes employees unhappy

Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around “From Worst to First,” a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim “the customer is always right” didn’t hold sway at Continental.

In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Here’s how he puts it:

When we run into customers that we can’t reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees . . .

We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When it’s a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?

You can’t treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them . . . If they think that you won’t support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment.

So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers, where the “always right” maxim squarely favors the customer – which is not a good idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees.

Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. But trying to solve this by declaring the customer “always right” is counter-productive.

2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage

Using the slogan “The customer is always right” abusive customers can demand just about anything – they’re right by definition, aren’t they? This makes the employees’ job that much harder, when trying to rein them in.

Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keepthem coming back.

3: Some customers are bad for business

Most businesses think that “the more customers the better”. But some customers are quite simply bad for business.

Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story:

One of our service technicians arrived at a customer’s site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer.

When he’d finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customer’s contract.

Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. Note that it was not even a matter of a financial calculation – not a question of whether either company would make or lose money on that customer in the long run. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right.

4: It results in worse customer service

Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second – Put your people first and watch’em kick butt.

Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because:

• They care more about other people, including customers
• They have more energy
• They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with
• They are more motivated

On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that:

• Employees are not valued
• That treating employees fairly is not important
• That employees have no right to respect from customers
• That employees have to put up with everything from customers

When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible – the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: corteous on the surface only.

5: Some customers are just plain wrong

Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows:

Herb Kelleher [...] makes it clear that his employees come first — even if it means dismissing customers. But aren’t customers always right? “No, they are not,” Kelleher snaps. “And I think that’s one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people.’”

If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethune’s book “From Worst to First”:

A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passenger’s child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kid’s father and asked him to put away the hat. “No,” the guy said. “My kid can wear what he wants, and I don’t care who likes it.”

The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendant’s duties. The guy better put away the hat.

He did, but he didn’t like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasn’t hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didn’t want to see him and I didn’t want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means we’ll take him where he wants to go. But if he’s going to be rude and offensive, he’s welcome to fly another airline.

The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service.

So put your people first. And watch them put the customers first.

Early into my sales career I found myself working in a regional electronics and appliance store trying to figure out how to sell the stuff I was surrounded by but had ignored my whole life growing up, appliances.

The #1 reason I wanted to know how to sell appliances was not for the noble purpose of being a knowledgeable source of information for customers; it was for a far more selfish reason, I wanted to beat Davis.

Even on my first day as a trusty new representative, I could see Davis was not a man to be trusted. He had shifty eyes, a smirk like he knew something you didn’t, and a good decade of experience on the rest of us. Picture Snidely Whiplash without the top hat.

Davis was the number one sales rep my first month at the store. He was also number one each and every month he had ever worked there. He was a selling machine and was being paid stupid money compared to the rest of the sales team.

How could a guy that looked about as trustworthy as a snake in a cage full of furry mice continually outsell every other guy on the floor? Why didn’t the customers see right through that stupid grin?

Trying to figure it out, I asked each and every other rep what they thought his secret was before my first two months was at an end.

“He just lies and tells them stuff to get the sale.”

“He has been here so long he has repeat customers that wait for him.”

“He steals sales on your day off.”

“The owner throws extra special customers his way.”

“Customers just don’t understand what a shyster he is.”

“He has good product knowledge.”

And finally…

“He is just good.”

It seemed easy to believe the repeat customer part, or that he had built up a client base that would come back to see him, but that did not make sense if he was lying to every customer he sold to.

The only thing I could see as a tangible difference was his product knowledge, so I set about learning about every item in the store. Anytime a manufacturer’s rep would come in the store I would quiz him about every feature and benefit to every box in the building that we carried.

I studied owner’s manuals (this was long before the Internet) and product sales literature. I watched the TV commercials to see how they were pitching the products. I even went to other appliance stores to watch reps, ask questions, and in general try to be an information sponge.

Finally, after six months of careful painstaking study I knew the story and feature set behind every product in the building and I thought for certain the very next month would spell the end of Davis’ streak of consecutive months at being number one.

I beamed with pride the first day of the month because I crushed Davis’ totals. I sold $2000 worth of merchandise, Davis sold $359 worth. Of course, it was a hollow victory, as that had been Davis’ day off and his one sale was a customer coming back with his card to buy a TV.

Day two, though, I was ready. I had a two pronged attack planned. I had massive product knowledge and I was fast, so I could out run Davis to the customers. I was certain with knowledge and speed combined, Davis would be doomed.

Davis crushed me.

Day 3. Davis crushed me.

Day 4. I was off. Davis crushed me.

Day 5. I was working. Davis crushed me.

With few moments of triumph, which I had already accomplished a time or two before I set my new strategy in play, that is how the entire month played out.

Finally, I decided Davis must have access to product knowledge through his experience I just did not know, so I decided to ask him how to sell Maytag washing machines, because Davis sold them better than anybody and they were expensive compared to the other brands for the most part.

What Davis said that day changed my perception of sales every subsequent day for the rest of my sales life.

He said “When a customer likes the Maytag’s, I sell them a Maytag. When a customer likes the Kitchenaid, I sell them a Kitchenaid.”

Don’t worry; it took me a bit of thinking to unlock the brilliance of that statement as well, so I followed up his statement with a very succinct question.

“Huh?” David laughed at me, looking at me like I was a little boy playing a game for the grownups.

“When the customer likes the Maytag, I tell them about how the small agitator in the Maytag washer is easy on their cloths, because friction with the agitator makes the cloths wear out more quickly. Maytag moves the water through the cloths, not the clothes through the water. Plus they are easy to repair yourself with front access and pieces that are user serviceable.” He said. “When a customer likes the Kitchenaids, I explain how the large agitator in the washer does a fantastic job of churning the cloths and scrubbing them clean as Kitchenaids move the cloths through the water and there are no belts that need replacing like there are on the Maytag’s. Get it?”

“Yes.” I said. I lied. It took even more thinking that night to figure out what he just said then it hit me like, like, like a truckload of Maytag washing machines.

I realized I had done all the research; from Consumer Reports to vendor reps and manuals, etc. and I had decided, based on my expert opinion, which products were the best and those were the ones I tried to sell everyone. If they did not see the brilliance of my logic, I would continue to whack them over the head with facts demonstrating why I was smarter than them and why they should pick the product I was recommending.

As a result I only sold customers I could shoehorn into what I thought was best, and I was taking way too long with the ones that were not listening, meaning Davis was selling more and getting to more customers.

Davis would steal a sale or two on your day off if you would let him, but he never tried to swim upstream with a customer unnecessarily to get them to buy what he thought was best. To his credit, the one the customer bought was the best one because that was the one that got him paid, not the guy at the appliance store across the street.

If you are selling multiple brands of essentially the same basic product, try to understand what each individual brand of that product type is trying to hang their hat on, so to speak.

There will be products selling on no other value than being the lowest price in the category, there will be products that try to offer a unique feature or service that they will try to differentiate themselves with and there will be the top of the line, feature rich models.

Which one should you sell? All of them. Ask your qualifying questions and listen to the answers. Let their needs and wants drive what you sell, not some preconceived notion of what you think is best.

Listen then educate, never dictate or pontificate.

I love cheesy sales one liners.

Image courtesy of newsday.com