Whilst it should go without saying, does your customer always come first?

And do you allow them to think they’re right all the time?

Sure, customers aren’t always right – we’ll come onto that a bit later – but in these days of instant complaints, they need to think they are right or, at least, that their concerns are being heard and that you’re doing more than paying lip service to them.

Customers almost always have a choice. Even when there’s a near-monopoly as there is in search, they can still choose someone other than Google.

Depending on the country you live in, some or all of your utilities such as electricity and water could be a single option.

But for our businesses, that’s never the case.

Customers have more choice than ever before and they’re exercising their choice more vocally than ever before. It’s incredibly easy to Tweet or put a comment on Facebook or find a review site for them to vent their concerns and I’ve read that a lot of companies monitor and react to such outbursts faster than in any other medium – primarily because they have to.

What does this mean for you?

It means that you have to examine your business from a customer’s viewpoint.

It’s easy to get so involved with our sites that we can’t see them from the customer’s perspective.

Depending on how you promote your site, there will be a differing proportion of people who’ve visited it before and ones who are visiting for their first – maybe their only – time.

For instance, currently this site gets around 80% of its traffic from people visiting after I send an email out to my list.

The remainder of the traffic comes from EzineArticles, Google and a forum I frequent. And the occasional other place.

Your figures will be different but you should be able to work them out from Google Analytics (if you’ve got it installed) or one of the log programs in your hosting control panel.

Probably the first thing you’ll notice is that almost no-one comes into your site via the main index page.

So the experience on every single page matters.

If you’ve got a pop-up that appears, maybe for an offer or to encourage people to sign up to your list, check your stats to see whether it’s getting many signups. Or whether it’s just bugging your customers like the full page ads on Forbes or the ads that appear before you can view a YouTube video.

If the pop-up is one that’s supplied by a service such as Aweber then you can set it so that it appears after a time delay and you can also set whether it appears (annoyingly) on every visit or just once or every set number of days.

It’s worth checking your signup stats to see whether it’s even worth including at all.

And think deeper about it.

For instance, even though I’ve not been on their site very often, I remember that Forbes are totally in-your-face with their advert and if I see the Forbes in the search results it won’t be the first link I click.

You don’t want your potential customers to be thinking that!

Go through the list of things that bug you when you reach a website and check that you’re not including those or, at the very least, have an exceptionally good reason.

My list – and I might have a few older sites where I’m ignoring one or two of these because they seemed like a good idea at the time and I’ve not got round to removing them – includes:

• Popups – either on arrival or on exit
• Auto-start videos
• Pages where there’s nothing to do except watch the video or click the back button
• Sites where there’s a “please don’t go” alert that then offers a lower price to people who are less loyal to them. On the rare occasion when I’ve promoted that kind of site, I’ve actually told my subscribers to click away so that they qualify for the lower price.
• Misleading copy. That could be anything from a white lie to an out-and-out untruth like the UK based travel currency site Thomson who publish “web only” prices on their site that aren’t available for delivery via the web. Pure lies and that leaves a nasty taste in anyone’s mouth. Even worse as the fictional prices are updated daily.
• False deadlines. The countdowns that lurk on page implying scarcity that may or may not exist. Or the “only available today” offers that are there again when you visit the site tomorrow.
• False scarcity – the “buy now whilst we’ve still got a stock of electrons” kind of deals.
• False upcoming price rises – the price will rise in 48 hours (or whatever) and you go back next week and it’s still the same.
• False reduced prices – much like the supermarkets here in the UK either increase the price for the requisite 28 days before cutting it back to what it was before or drop the price because something is now in season or – like most furniture stores here – have put the item in a dusty corner of a store at the higher price so that they can claim it’s now available at half price.
• Not replying to emails and other messages. Or making it almost impossible to contact a human – Ebay have learned that lesson and you can now speak to someone but hell would freeze over before that happened with Google.

All these and more send off the wrong signals to your potential customers.

They sense that you’re not putting them first.

And, subconsciously, they trust you less and look elsewhere for whatever it is you’re selling.

Then there’s the part about the customer always being right.

Of course they’re not always right – no-one could be.

But because bad news always travels further and faster than good news, that doesn’t matter.

If you give the customer the run-around, it will come back to haunt you.

Worthless guarantees full of weasel clauses are something that bugs customers.

If you offer a no quibble money back guarantee, you need to honour it.

Nordstrom famously refunded a tire purchase even though they don’t sell tires.

OK, you might not go that far in proving the customer is right but you can certainly err on the side of them being right.

Of course, if they’re a serial refunder then you might decide to take them off your email list but that’s not the same as telling them they’re wrong.

Going back to Thomson, the travel money company, again: they offer a buy-back scheme. You pay an extra amount of money (£3.95 which is around $7) to be able to bring back any unused notes and exchange them at the same rate as you bought them at.

If you’ve not been to a particular country before and don’t know how much you’re likely to spend, it can be worthwhile.

Until their guaranteed buy back has clauses they don’t publish.

Nowhere in the customer facing disclaimers does it say that there’s a minimum value for an individual note.

And some countries have very low value notes.

But you’re not told about that until you try to exchange the notes back and the cashier casually says “we can’t take that one”.

If it was my company, I’d change that policy on the spot. (Actually, I wouldn’t have introduced it in the first place).

The risk reward ratio is stacked in favour of a disgruntled customer.

Especially when – according to the published small print – the customer really is right.

Quibbling over a note that’s worth 8p has cost them a lifetime of future commissions for currency exchanges and they’re a lot further down the list for any future holiday purchases.

Dumb move.

And you need to make sure that you’re not doing the same thing in your business.

At the risk of increasing my return rate, I’ve refunded customers who’ve “bought the product twice by mistake” even when my records show they’ve only bought it once.

And a company I ran a number of years ago honoured an “early bird” coupon 5 years after it had expired. In that instance, the customer knew it was a try-on but asked and got the answer they hoped they’d get.

It’s just much better sense to do that occasionally than it does to have bad news flooding the internet.

Take the time to think about any instances where a customer may be right or may be wrong.

And almost all the time, I suggest you should consciously decide that regardless of the circumstances, the customer is right.

Feel free to add your comments and thoughts below.