Mine

It’s a truism in the Service Sector – at least among management personnel – that it’s always the nice customers with whom you have to be the most careful. Bad customers, whether absurdly entitled, short-tempered, fault-finding, easily offended, bigoted, smug, condescending, mind-numbingly cheap, exceptionally rude, chronically late for everything, out of touch with current pricing, oblivious to health and safety regulations, unafraid of the law, or simply whacked out of their tiny little minds are not going to alter their behavior not matter what we do, and that includes boycotting our business. In fact, some of these oddballs will actually refuse to do business with any company that does not give them things to complain about. In many cases, it is doubtful if you could actually lose these customers if you tried, and there would be little to worry about if you did. They’re not really the problem…

The real problem are those customers who will arrive without fuss, behave politely, follow any clear signage or instructions, pay the appropriate price for the product or service – and leave, never to return, if treated badly by the customer service personnel. In fact, if your company’s customer service personnel are sufficiently incompetent, or if your company’s customer service policies are sufficiently horrendous, you may be quietly hemorrhaging these customers and never know it until the firm starts to go bankrupt…

Now, I’m not suggesting that the customer service function is easy, or that managing personnel who perform that function isn’t a challenge. The truth is that while inventory loss due to customer actions – shoplifting as well as vandalism – does not approach the losses most businesses experience due to employee theft and damage, those actions are much more exasperating to the front-line personnel who have to clean up the resulting mess, and front-line managers who have to deal with both the horrible customers (and outright thieves) and the corrosive effect they have on the employees. It does not take many episodes of being lied to, cheated, insulted, abused, or grossly inconvenienced before the average person will realize that any given visitor may turn out to be completely monstrous and start treating everyone as a potential criminal…

In many cases the “nice” customers are the counterpart of our “loyal” employees – the people who adhere to company policy, do their best to perform their job duties correctly despite the miserable conditions and insulting salaries, and would never dream of stealing. Treating these people as potential thieves and embezzlers makes no more sense than treating all customers as potential shoplifters and vandals. Where this becomes a critical problem is when a loyal employee is trying to adhere to the company policies and rules (standards to which the company is holding them) but in doing so outrages a customer, either because the customer really is a thief or a scam artist, or because they’re a nice customer who resents this treatment. This can, and frequently does, result in a situation where the employees know that if they deviate from company policy they will be fired, but if they comply with company policy and a customer complains about them (either because they’ve been thwarted from taking criminal actions or because they’re honest people who would never resort to criminal actions – the behavior is generally the same) they will be fired anyway…

Faced with this kind of Catch-22 situation, many employees will attempt to balance the need to conform to absolute, arbitrary rules written by people who may be completely out of touch with the realities of front-line customer service and the need to placate difficult, dishonest, or completely sociopathic customers. However, some employees will become disillusioned, engage in counterproductive work behaviors (from loafing to outright theft), or just quit, resulting in many of the problems described in the previous post. After all, being threatened with termination (or actually being terminated) so that a thieving “customer” can successful steal from the company is completely unjust, and utterly violates the implied social contract between the employee and his or her supervisor…

There have been a number of attempts to change this situation, or at least contain the most damaging parts, to both the employees and the customers who would actually be worth having. But that will bring us to Part Three of the story…