I was raised with the idea that the customer is always right. Many people my age remember being taught the same. I was not taught that concept so I could boss around vendors (bossiness was no part of the lessons nice girls were raised with in the 1950’s, at least not in my neighborhood) but because many parents believed that customer service was a skill we kids should learn. It was just another form of good manners.

Now I don’t for a minute believe that anyone ever meant the phrase literally. Customers can be wrong just as often as anyone else. It's just that serving a customer or waiting on someone required an added level of courtesy, irrespective of whether that person was right or wrong, or of whether the customer was polite or rude, kind or horrible. Courtesy was the order of the day, no matter what.

As I understood it, the issue was not whether the customer was actually correct, it was that each customer was entitled to her point of view, and it was the job of the seller/service person/vendor to fit the interaction to meet the needs and demands of the customer. You could, over time, decide to sever the business relationship, but as long as you agreed to take money for a transaction, the customer in that transaction was to be accorded a certain courtesy, and the shorthand for that understanding was that the customer was always right. 

No intelligent person really believes that every customer is always right. But we need to get back to the belief that customers are entitled to a degree of courtesy and regard, that respect is due whether or not we like their point of view, and that keeping customers happy is a key business goal, no matter what.

We’ve all heard the claim that a happy customer tells 5 friends and an unhappy customer tells 100.  In the days of blogs, e-mail and IM, it's safe to extend the reach of those unhappy customers exponentially. If the experience is bad enough, the unhappy customer builds a website and tells the world. But with the easy access of blogs and forums, even the less adventurous dissatisfied customer can tell hundreds or thousands with virtually no effort. Dell sure learned this the hard way when Jeff Jarvis shared his purchase experience with the online world, and this experience is becoming very common for companies of all types and all sizes.

So, what’s a marketer to do? As I’ve said in this space already, we have to train every employee (customer-facing or back office) to interact with clients as if the client were right. In addition, we need to test that training by setting up difficult customer test cases to see if the training is actually sticking. And, we need to watch the blogs to see what others are saying about us, so we can respond quickly to resolve a small problem before it becomes an epidemic.

Is the customer always right? Of course not. Do we need to treat them as if they are? You bet we do. And if we don’t each find ways to do this for our individual businesses, those customers are going to let us and the world know just how unhappy (and right!) they really are.

Janet Ryan is VP - Publisher for Macworld magazine, the leading print and online publication for the Mac market. Macworld's online publications are macworld.com, playlistmag.com and macosxhints.com. Macworld is a publication of IDG, which publishes over 150 trade and computer magazines and produces, among other events, the popular Macworld Expo. She is a 27+ year sales professional with expertise in consultative and conversational selling. She has sold millions of dollars worth of corporate contracts, run multimillion dollar profit centers, and trained thousands of salespeople to more effectively meet their sales and professional development goals. She can be reached at: jryan@macworld.com.