My recent posts about Homestead's philosophy of putting the employee ahead of the customer seem to have hit a nerve in the blogosphere. Last week one of our unhappy customers (yes, unfortunately we have a few) posted on his own blog an article entitled Homestead CEO says screw customers! It was an interesting (if not entirely accurate, especially the catchy title) interpretation of a post of mine from November entitled Maybe you should fire that customer? His post was then posted on a popular social bookmarking site called Digg and you can read all of the 150+ Digg comments here. The beauty of the web is that you can draw your own conclusions and join in the conversation yourself, so if you have time on your hands, "digg" in.
I won't respond to his post here but I do want to emphasize that this is not a practice which we employ widely here at Homestead. Nor should any business, as I mentioned in the postscript of my original post--if you do, you've got a big problem with your business. You can count the number of Homestead customers whom we have ever fired on your fingers, and I'm the only one who's ever literally "fired" a customer.
However, the philosophy that our employees have the right to demand basic respect, integrity and decency from everybody that they deal with--each other, our customers, our partners, our management team--is very powerful and pervasive in the Homestead culture. It allows them to do their jobs with pride, professionalism, and self-respect. Of course, our support reps have to follow much stricter rules of politeness and conduct than we expect from our customers, and we record every single call so that we can monitor their behavior. Every single time we get a complaint (even mild ones) from a customer about our support, we review the recording and take the appropriate action. Sometimes this results in termination or strict reprimand, more often a coaching session with their manager.
But let's return to the general topic of putting employees ahead of customers, and rejecting the hackneyed philosophy of "the customer is always right." The topic seems to have struck a chord with people on both sides of the argument, but mostly from business owners who feel customers have been falsely empowered to act like jerks, sapping their resources and energy, and hurting their ability to serve their non-jerk customers (most people) and build great businesses. This response is entirely predictable, because in my experience almost all businesses feel this way--they are just afraid to say it. I'm not.
Contrary to the belief of some of the vocal critics I've heard from in the past few weeks, businesses do not exist in order to provide the lowest level of service to everybody except for "squeaky wheels" or people who have difficulty finding the value in what they offer. They also don't exist to provide every conceivable benefit to anybody who asks for it, in any manner, at any price.
To prove my point, I'd like you to humor me in a thought experiment: Imagine a group of people walking into a restaurant dressed slovenly, talking loudly, cussing, and reeking of alcohol. Assume that they manage to get by the person at the front. Then they are rude to their waitperson, accuse them loudly of having a bad attitude while they are ordering, and then shout "this isn't what I ordered, you $!@&" when the food arrives. Does the restaurant have a responsibility to serve these people? What do the other patrons think, and how does it impact their quality of service? How can the waitperson be expected to serve the rest of the tables with a positive attitude after being treated so disrespectfully? Could you really blame him/her if customers later in the evening got poor service, or if she snapped at them rudely when she thought another party was about to behave the same way? If you were the owner of the restaurant, would you tell your employees to suck it up, how dare they be short with your customers no matter what happened earlier, and if they don't like the atmosphere and the customers, they can quit? Or would you kick those people out of your restaurant, make it clear they were never allowed in again, and tell the employees that they can use their judgment and alert the manager sooner next time if they think things are getting out of hand?
If I owned the restaurant, I would definitely do the latter. First of all, just based on principal, I don't want disrespectful jerks in my restaurant, and I can choose to deny service to anybody I want, as long as it isn't discriminating on the basis of race, age, gender, sexual preference, looks, or some other discriminatory bias. Secondly, it's bad business. The other people in the restaurant that night didn't get their money's worth. The ambiance was destroyed, service was slower because people were dealing with the jerks, and even later in the evening employees were still rattled and not giving good service. The food was probably a little less tasty, and more likely to arrive cold. Employees probably didn't turn over tables as quickly, or didn't push wine/dessert/drinks quite as much, which resulted in lower revenue. One or more employees became a step closer to quitting that night, and lost respect for the managers and owners because nothing was done. In short, trying to treat that one table of jerks with respect creates a huge domino effect, that leads not just to loss of short term profit, but erosion of long term quality in your business.
This is my point. If you are starting or building a business of your own, you have to decide where you draw the line for dealing with disrespectful or unreasonable, or impossible-to-satisfy customers. It's a decision that will have broader implications than you might suspect, because any business has limited resources, and you have to use them as wisely as possible to achieve your definition of success. My definition doesn't include serving extremely rude or unreasonably demanding customers, at the expense of my employees' happiness and capacity to delight the rest of our customers. Does yours?
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