If you worked in customer service; what do you think of the phrase "The customer is always right"?

[Angie7F]

Having worked in service i know that many people can be irrationally asshole-ish.

I usually shrug them off because people have bad days and you can be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I dont take it personally at all and no one really should.

 

[Dirge Eterna]

I disagree with that statement as well, when I worked at Best Buy I would go out of my way to help someone who was nice and asked for things without a entitled attitude or being a jerk. I would do the bare minimum for the ass holes who wanted whatever instantly and at a discount. Luckily our store manager would rather jettison an asshole than try to butter them up to keep them coming back. Best example was when a lady bought a new computer, monitor, printer and accessories from me. I think she paid about $3,000 in 1998. This brainiac puts all that in the back of her pickup and drives down the shopping center to Walmart to go grocery shopping. Someone steals all her stuff and she comes thundering into the store screaming that we owed her a new computer because it was stolen. My manager literally laughed in her face and when she refused to leave the store called the cops on her.

Then you have the opposite where as an employee you want to help someone but the company doesn't give you the time, tools or authority to do it. For a year I worked for an HMO in a call center. It was the most soul sucking experience ever, I had to listen to stories of people and their families getting sick and being denied coverage for petty BS. We weren't even really allowed to help them if it was a problem we could fix as we had to get them off the phone in 6min or less or our supervisor was literally over our shoulder yelling at us to finish up. it would take people 10 or 15 calls sometimes to finally push enough that a supervisor would take their call and then assign it to someone to fix. I hated it, I hated telling people I couldn't help them and that my supervisor wasn't there or wouldn't take their calls. Grrrrr I still get pissed of 10 years later about what they did. My wife worked there for 8 years and she saw the same thing over and over again but she was in another department so she wasnt in the firing line like I was.

 

[xmbts]

That phrase is mostly there to brown nose the customer because if you don't do that then they'll go elsewhere. I had a customer say "The customer is always right" when trying to get me to give her something for free. It's a grocery store, it doesn't run on good vibes, quite the opposite in fact it's a den of misery and moneygrubbing.

And food... I'm fairly certain there is food at grocery stores...<.<

OT: never worked much in retail of any kind... but from personal experience, it's a load of crap, making the customer feel more entitled to the store, than the people who work there, and generally breeding a hostile attitude towards works... where they're considered more servants than actual people...<.<

though I suppose you do get paid to take that shit...

Nope, most people come in for the redbox, cigarettes, and scratch tickets, with the odd one coming in for 8 pounds of disgusting yogurt, which I refuse to acknowledge as food.

 

[DugMachine]

Hell no. When I worked in retail, I tried to please the customers sure but if they were making a complete ass of themselves and being rude to me and my coworkers I told them to fuck off. Literally. I've told maybe 20+ customers in my life to go and fuck themselves and walk off.

Been fired once for doing it at one job and then the other job my manager wasn't a complete yes man who tried to kiss ass to every customer. He realized one customer lost was not going to bring in the store a hundred thousand dollars, so fuck them he said. I'd love to work for that guy again. He had a "I don't care" attitude yet worked extremely hard and was a customer favorite.

 

[AstylahAthrys]

The customer is usually wrong, and often very dumb and obnoxious, at least the ones you have to deal with for extended periods of time. Smart customers are easy to deal with and don't take much of you time. For the sake of good customer service, though, you gotta grin and be friendly and helpful and pretend that the customer is right, because as long as they think they are, they're more apt to go to your store or buy your product.

 

[Atmos Duality]

It is a cute business-based platitude designed to weight the value of customer experience more than simple logic.

 

[Trinab]

I worked for close to five years retail, and generally, as stated in previous posts, the only customers that throw out that line are ones causing trouble.

Generally it's safer to say 'The Company's policies are always right.' They are your shield, an aegis to be used defensively and offensively when needed. As long as you follow the policies in everything you do, you will excel in customer service.

It's actually somewhat fun, playing with a belligerent customer. (Usually,) the moment someone walks in with a bad attitude, they are trying to get around a perceived policy, for example, returns without receipts, unwarranted discounts, price-matches for items that can't be price matched, etcetera. If you can find a way to use the policies to get what they want, a lot of these angry people will end up pleasantly surprised and leave happy. If you cannot, well, you still have your shield. They got a problem with it, have them go further up. They can't hurt you if you are behind the shield of company policy.

 

[Aramis Night]

Seeing as how ive had to mop dressing rooms of people's disgusting sexual fluids(women and men's) more than once who had no actual interest in purchasing anything, it's not hard to see where i stand on this. Needless to say, i now have a strict one person at a time policy for dressing rooms. Sadly it still doesnt stop the masturbators. Can't we just make abortion's/mass sterilization mandatory yet?