Dealing With Unreasonable Customers

OK High performance leaders, here's a question for you: what's more important and comes first in your priorities -- customers or team members?

I've worked with many organizations that always put customers first. A few teams would also focus on team member happiness (or at least say they do).

Here's the problem. Unhappy team members create more unhappy customers. Here's another problem: really poorly behaving customers make it so rough for team members that they also become unhappy, spreading the unhappiness around. That's not the result we want.

Conversely, nice customers recognize the hard work that team members do. Polite customer realize that they may not always BE the center of the universe. Smart and reasonable customers realize that you are not entitled to something just because you demand it and that demanding it progressively louder does not increase the merits of your case.

Can't we all play well together?

As a high performance leader, I encourage you to consider the health and dignity of your team members first. Treated with respect most team members will do a wonderful job of building great relationships with customers. Allowed to be disrespected by customers, even the strong team members could lose hope and energy.

I've seen the impact of watching leadership march an unruly customer out the door and invite them to shop somewhere else. For the rest of the day (maybe the rest of the week) the team was totally energized and reached new levels of loyalty to the organization.

The world is full of nice customers. Let the rude, unreasonable ones shop someplace else.

-- Douglas Brent Smith

If you'd like to train your supervisors to build more customer happiness and team member happiness while improving your bottom-line results, contact me today about bringing our workshops to your location. A great place to start is with Supervising for Success.

doug@frontrangeleadership.com

Comments

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