The Customer Is Not Always Right: Protecting Employees from Customers

This article is intended for managers and business owners in traditional private-sector companies.

We all know the saying, “The customer is always right.” Many business owners and managers swear by it. At the very least, many will say that the customer is of the highest priority. However, those very same people will hypocritically turn to their team and say the same thing about them. This contradiction consistently happens behind the closed doors of every business. Managers will always have to choose between the customer and their team’s wellbeing, while simultaneously trying to look like a friend to both. If you are a customer/client, always remember that every time you acted difficult or demanding towards your provider company, they had to push their workers a little harder and said a few “non-PR friendly” things about you.

Before we begin, it is important to note that we are talking about standard businesses; not those with lives on the table, such as healthcare, security, etc. Those are different from other non-essential companies and have additional ethical factors. With that said, how legit is the “customer is always right” dogma?

As managers, your responsibility is to pursue the interests of your team and company. They are the ones who do the actual work and spend hours of their days on tasks instead of many other things they would rather do. The customers, as valuable as they are, just pay and leave without having to worry about the toll of it all. They simply do not care about how difficult it was for your team, how many nights they had to stay up, or how often they missed spending time with their loved ones. You, as a manager, are there to protect them.

When talking about customers, for some reason, most imagine a well-meaning, smiling, open-minded, and polite person/entity. Such customers are extraordinarily rare and should be treated like treasures they are. Unfortunately, most customers are quite the opposite and do not warrant such treatment unless they are so high-paying that your company’s financial health depends on them.

If you think that this description of customers/clients is aggressive and inaccurate, take yourself as an example. You are a customer of hundreds, if not thousands, of companies. You regularly pay them for goods and services (with money, data, or time). How many of those companies do you care about? How often do you wonder how hard they are making their teams work? Do you even care? If you are honest with yourself, you will admit that you only want to pay, get your product/service ASAP, and go on with your life. This is true with almost everyone. A typical customer is a very egoistic, apathetic, and short-sighted entity, and that is OK. It is not their job to care. It is up to the company and its managers to care about their people.

So when you have to work your team extra hard for a customer, remember that the customer will get what they need and forget you, while your team will have to do the work. And if you are more bothered by personally looking good in front of the customer instead of pushing the interests of your team, you are maliciously acting against your own company. Because it means that you are trying to have a good reputation with a third party (customer) by using the company’s labor, rather than being loyal to your group and protecting them. Remember, you will have to keep working with your team tomorrow; the customer will not.

Putting the customer higher at the cost of the team is a very short-sighted approach. Do not forget, the customer has absolutely no interest in your company beyond their needs. Tomorrow is your concern and no one else’s. If you push your team too much for a short-time customer, you risk burning out your team and losing them. Gradually and justly, it will catch up to you. Do not sacrifice many tomorrows for a singular today.

It is a horrible situation when your customer retention is high but not your employee retention. More often than not, it means you failed to represent your team’s interests and protect them. At that point, you are not even a team because your team members come and go, taking turns to be burned out for money. Thankfully, that is a self-fixing problem since such companies do not last.

It is necessary to note that while we are talking about how important it is to protect the team, sometimes we do have to make sacrifices. Managers and decision-makers often have to swallow their self-respect and nurture a high-paying but difficult client, even if it means pushing their team harder. In some unfortunate situations, you have to do everything you can to keep the company afloat and think of the greater good. That is why you should always avoid having a single customer become a major source of revenue. You need to diversify and multiply your customer list so that, when necessary, you can remove unwanted ones. This will move the power from the customers to the company’s employees. With that power, you can avoid overworking the team for the clients that do not warrant it. Always remember, if you can afford it, difficult and/or unworthwhile customers can and should be abandoned in favor of the team’s well-being. Especially when you have better customers on the list.

In the end, managers will always have to balance the interests of their team and the customers/clients. There is no singular answer on how one should behave, but at the very least, we can conclude that the customer is not always right. This saying is a horrible way to run a business if you are aiming to build a lasting, noteworthy company.

Of course, companies exist thanks to their clients, and employees are paid with their money. However, just as customers see companies as replaceable providers, so should companies have the option to see some customers as such, especially when the well-being of the team is on the table.

Balancing customers and your team’s well-being is a tied rope you have to balance. Putting one above the other will result in your falling.