The customer is always right, sometimes..

Remember, the customer is always right

One of the first things anyone who thinks they know something about business tells you is: “Remember, the customer is always right.”

I am here today to call bullshit on this. It is true sometimes, but not always.

I’ve been running ecommerce businesses for 4 years now, and let me tell you, people can be very nasty when they are anonymous and safe behind their keyboard. We call them keyboard warriors.

Exhibit 1

We recently had our Black Friday sale for The Daily Wine. To put the magnitude/madness of Black Friday into perspective - it’s not uncommon to do a month’s sales volume in a few days during this period. This is great, but it’s a recipe for creating customer support queries.

• Clients get impatient with the delivery times
• They order items that they did not want (or they don’t read the description, more on that later)
• They get mad when items are out of stock
• They post hateful comments on Facebook/Instagram ads (secret: I just delete the comments and block them forever)

For a very small team like ours at The Daily Wine, this can get overwhelming.

Ping - an email lands in my inbox

Now when I get an email from a client, my stomach drops and my heart starts pounding, because I know something probably went wrong. Why? Because rarely does a client contact you to say: “Great work, keep it up!”. I read this one 6am in the morning.

Here’s the email. I have blocked out his details.

After reading his email, I immediately knew which wine he had purchased. The name on the website is Rosé Kaal Vonkel. Here is the product image:

And here is the product description:

Uncork a sparkling surprise with our tantalising KAAL/NAKED Sparkling Wines! These bubbly beauties are breaking all the rules, flaunting their bare brilliance without any labels.This sparkling wine is off-dry with just the right amount of sweetness! By not putting a label on these bottles, we can offer them to you at an irresistible 40% off!

Now if that description is not clear, I don’t know what is. It does say it does not have labels, it does say it is off-dry. He had all the information before him, he just did not read.

Now my question to you is - is this customer right? Definitely not.

My reply

I then proceeded in writing the following reply:

Now I have to admit, it felt a little too good to send this email. But I believe that it was very well written and not unreasonable.

The apology

Then I waited and the evening around 7pm I got a reply.

Firstly, I have to give him kudos for being man enough to admit he was wrong and apologise. But this is a classic bully reaction.

Only when one of the kids on the school ground stands up to the bully does he burst out into tears and maybe change. Why do we need to go through the preceding steps first. This is probably not something that can change, but I do believe we can learn some lessons from this exchange.

Lessons learned

Here are my key takeaways from this:

• The customer is right sometimes, but not always
• If you get 100 orders, 2 or 3 of those customers will be extremely impolite and send an email like the one above or worse.
  • If you are wrong, admit it and rectify it immediately if you can
  • If they are wrong, stand up for yourself
• You cannot keep everyone happy. If you lose a few customers, it’s fine. You don’t need all of them, your business will be fine, focus on keeping the rest happy.
• Don’t be the customer who throws their toys out of the cot. Always be a little kinder than you think you need to be, you don’t know what the other person is going through.
• Try and be the customer who sends a positive email if you got great service - building a business is hard and we don’t hear “you are doing a good job” enough.