Popular business advice says, “The customer is always right.”
On the surface, this seems true. But if you look deeper, you’ll see that this conventional wisdom reeks of people pleasing. And it plays off some of the deepest human insecurities, including the question, “What if people don’t like me?”
The phrase “The customer is always right” implies that you as a business should do whatever you can to make the customer happy and to give them what they want.
Here’s the problem. What if you’re dealing with a customer who has no idea what the hell they really want? Or a customer whose subconscious mind ensures that he or she is always “confused”? What if this customer’s world view is structured in such a way that ANY company they deal with is always wrong?
No…the customer is not always right. Sometimes the customer is riddled with limited beliefs, inaccurate thinking, blaming, and other toxic behaviors that even the most crisp and well-written marketing messages can’t break through.
If these people give your business too many problems, it’s time to let them go. They lose their right to be your customer. They can go find another company to bother — one that incorporates codependency and people pleasing into its policies.
“But won’t I lose sales if I kick these customers out?” you might wonder.
It isn’t worth the sales if those people are giving you problems.
The thing about business is that you get to create it on your own terms. You get to create it around a mission of your choosing. You get to decide your branding. You didn’t go into business to cater to everybody or please everyone. You went into business to serve a specific target market with specific wants and needs and who are willing to pay good money to meet those wants and needs…not use you as their personal diary to complain about everything that went wrong.
The customer always has a right to choose whether or not to buy from you. But they’re not always right.
Talk soon,
Michelle
Michelle Lopez Boggs is a copywriter, copywriting mentor, and author of "The Anti-Marketing Manifesto: How to Sell Without Being a Sellout." She's helped her clients sell millions of dollars' worth of products and services online by using the MEI(S) principle — motivate, educate, and inspire, and sell. 