No Good Rotten Customer!

That No Good Rotten Customer!

Some readers will cringe while reading this and others will quietly lament. If there is one thing that ALL business owners and managers will agree on is that dealing with challenging customers can certainly take the fun out of the day. There is no business that hasn’t dealt with a challenging customer; I don’t mean one that tries to negotiate on price or other terms but rather one that causes so much grief that makes you question your future existence in business. If you’re in business any length of time you know what I mean.

Although I don’t believe there is any one good answer to alleviate painful encounters with difficult customers, there are certainly practices to improve a customer’s experience and minimize the frequency of complaints and difficult situations.

Here is why these are important:

• ·         Customer is vocally disruptful in store and turns away other potential customers.
• ·         Customer becomes violent and creates a harmful situation for you or your employees.
• ·         Customer posts derogatory remarks online.
• ·         Customer litigates and causes negative brand awareness.
• ·         Customer is unhappy and you don’t know it (the worst of them all). Negatively affects brand virally.
• ·         Customer has unrealistic expectations from lack of market awareness.

Rules are meant to be broken, policies are not. Explain in the most simplistic detail as possible what your relationship is to your customer and how the exchange of money for your product or service will take place. If they are not happy with your product or service, what will you do to make it right with them? Allow the customer to view your policies before every transaction. If you’re in retail than place a sign near the register, put it into your menu or flyer or incorporate it into a bounce-back coupon. So many companies feel the need for ‘small print’ to minimalize their liability and ultimately forget the basic customer experience. They then refer to the fine-print when there is an issue. If you’re one of these companies than consider having a ‘policy’ and then a terms and conditions for potentially ambiguous details. A policy should be readily displayed and touch on every aspect of your interaction with the customer in as simplistic detail as possible.  

If ‘policy’ is too corporate of a word for you than consider ‘credo’, mission statement or ‘our tenets’. We have suggested this to others and a common concern is one of fear that they will lose business because a ‘policy’ looks contractual and connotes a defensive mechanism with most. Like anything else, there is a right and wrong way to do it. Make them very legible, easily read (in Lehman’s terms of course) and very accessible.

A customer is not always right, but don’t react with this mindset but rather become proactive with it. It is impossible to be everything to everybody. Not everyone will like your product, or service or even you. The sooner you realize this and profile these ‘non-customers’ the less likely you are to have to deal with challenging customers. Then some would say; yes Tom, but this sounds prejudicial and just wrong. It is not; it is your business to know who your customer is and who they aren’t. If you service your non-customers than you run the risk of losing far more value in than sale than you received and risk damaging your brand by isolating your real customer market.

Businesses that have been around for years have learned their customer’s persona and don’t try to be everything to everybody. Focus on your specific market, tailor your simple policies to the market and make them readily available.

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