Not All Customers Are Equal

Probably a bigger lie than "Santa Claus Doesn't Exist" or anything preceded by "Trust Me!" is that old adage, "the customer is always right." They aren't. In fact, they are not only often wrong, but WRONG for YOU.

Have you heard this one? Customer contacts you with 5 questions about your product. You answer. Customer responds with another 3 questions, you respond. Customer then sends 2 more questions, you again answer and ... you never hear from them again. Now, I understand a legitimate follow-up from time to time, but my "bad customer flag" immediately comes up on anything more than a clarification. They are playing the "talk me out of this purchase game" and the loser is always you.

Here's another one. Customer asks if you'll give him a price cut, after all, he's a "Good" customer of yours. Turns out, he bought a ten dollar widget from you...three years ago! He's just not that into you...

There are dozens of examples, I'm sure you have just as many...but the key thing here is, you need to fire some customers and don't feel guilty about it. Every customer is not valuable. Many are down right expensive. It's the on key principle in the book "The Nordstrom Way". Nordstroms' customer service is held in high esteem, and rightly so. Stories such as one I personally heard where a shopper had forgotten shoes she bought for a specific event cross country. She frantically called the local Nordstroms to see if they had a pair. They didn't, but one across town did. They had the shoes delivered to her Hotel. Not only that, but when she asked how to return or pay for them, they just said "don't worry about." (Did I mention these where $800.00 shoes?) Now, how can a company stay in business doing that? Well, they can if the person we are talking about spends $30,000 a year at Nordstroms'.

While we may not have Nordstroms' customer database prowess, it does make sense to use whatever data we have at hand when interacting with existing "customers".