Discussion on:

The Customer is always right?

I agree with the customer being right, however, they are not ?always right?. I am certain there are plenty of technicians out there with similar stories, and we can start a mile-long discussion thread on this subject.

Someone once told me that, ?an educated and degreed engineer can design a multi-million dollar aircraft? but you could never let them fly it?. Such is the case with my situation. In this case, the customer was in fact wrong.

I had a programmer/developer who complained of computer problems. Come to find out, his hard drive was on its last leg. I pulled the drive and ?slaved? it in another PC, and attempted to pull data off of it using an industry standard recovery software. Although I managed to pull some off, the rest was just unrecognizable garbage. I used everything in my bag of tricks to try to save it. It was like an episode of ?geek ER?.

I went back to the end-user (customer) the very next morning and informed him of the bad news. At this point, the six-foot tall Eastern European gentleman became irate, and stood over me, yelling, and almost poking his finger in my chest. However, what he was unaware of was, I spent six years in the military, so he was getting nowhere fast with me. I have dealt with bigger and meaner guys.

I calmly, courteously, and professionally explained the situation, which made him even more irate. His solution? ?Why didn?t you just give me the drive, I could have recovered the data!!!?. Please refer back to my engineer analogy. I am sure he can write code like poetry, but I couldn?t trust his hardware abilities.

I gave him the drive, and as you may have already guessed, he couldn?t recover anything.

At this point, his department director/manager gets involved. It turns out this programmer had a 3GB backup tape drive built-in to his PC. His excuse for not using it was he had over 12GB of data to backup. Like stereo, his manager and I both asked, ?Why didn?t you just use several tapes??

Silence.

His manager told me, ?Sorry for troubling you with this issue, I am sure you have other, more important things to take care of. I?ll handle it from here.?

This guy smiled and said good morning to me everyday after this incident.

Learning how to deal with customers is a skill.

It's like kicking a football. There are methods more likely to result in success, and there are methods that wont.

Communications is a skill that can be taught or improved upon.

However, having been a part of other threads in TR where the so-called 'soft skills' are seemingly considered beneath the contempt of many professional IT workers, it isn't a surprise that many lack the necessary tools to simply and easily handle such situations.

Managing the client from anger and ignorance to enlightenment is both lots of fun and (often, in the long term) financially rewarding.

Customer service is, no doubt, an area where stress and bad tempers go with the job.

I would suggest that, if stress exacerbates an existing condition, then you need to learn and drill/practise some basic communications skills and (for want of a better word) complaint management techniques. The result will be far better stress management. Simple as that.

Customers always matter because earning customers' money is the ultimate goal of the business. But "the customer is always right", like any mantra or truism, is just a recommended starting assumption, not something that any reasonable person believes is *always*, *absolutely* true.

How inspiring an Article! Thanks.