"The customer is always right." 

It's a phrase with a kernel of truth but which is so over-compressed that most of the meaning has been squeezed out of it. It's also been over-used to the point where people don't even hear it anymore. It's become a shibboleth, taken as gospel. It's background noise, the water the business world swims in.

As a kid, I remember my parents taking me into a local grocery chain called Stew Leonard's, seeing this phrase prominently displayed at the entrance, chiseled in stone, as if it's a commandment passed down by a capitalist deity.

"The past is a foreign country." -L. P. Hartley

"Thou shalt not kill" means "don't kill other people." "The customer is always right" means "this business will do whatever it takes to make the customer happy."

it seems innocuous and obvious, but that's only because the phrase has become so common that we take it for granted. Treating this idea as a rule has some pretty obvious downsides if you think about it for a few seconds. It incentivizes awful, entitled behavior from customers, mistreatment or harassment of service workers, and a deliberate deprioritizing of anything that might "hurt the customer experience" (like employee health, the environment, or society as a whole). These things are even given a dry, sterile name so they fade in importance compared to the primacy of the customer experience - "externalities."

So a customer's happiness serves as the beacon that guides the business. Like a lighthouse guiding a ship in the fog. When a customer is unhappy, that should be heard as a foghorn blaring out: "rocks ahead!"
 

Rocks Customer complaints, ahoy!

But when you take a step back it seems like a pretty risky strategy to guide a business based on the subjective, inner state of a customer. After all, you don't only have one customer, you've got many! And they're all having different expereinces. All have different inner states. And many of those inner states are primarily driven by things that have nothing to do with your business. Maybe they're just hungry or tired or just had a fight with their kid when they walked in your store!

Yet despite all the downsides (ahem, "externalities"), interpreting "the customer is always right" as "do whatever the customer wants" was still a pretty good strategy in the pre-internet world. Businesses were constrained by their geographic location (especially grocery stores) and what they were offering was often a commodity (ESPECIALLY grocery stores). If your total addressable market has low ceiling and the main thing you offer is basically the same as other businesses, how do you differentiate from the competition? To put it plainly, why would a customer choose one grocery store over another?

The promise to a customer they'll treat your every whim as the right thing to do starts to sound like a pretty good one.

In a pre-internet world, distribution was costly. The farther a customer was physically from a business, the harder it was to reach them for a transaction (and vice-versa). This is one of the reasons why businesses that were able to build up and control distribution over a geographic area (think newspapers, media conglomerates, utility companies, cable companies) became powerful and often monopolies (or duopolies). 

It's also not an accident that companies in these industries did not adopt the "customer is always right" mantra. They didn't need to! What are you going to do? Get your electricity from the other electric company in your city?

But the internet came along and the cost of distribution went to 0. This is especially true for businesses that can be entirely run through the internet (from newsletters and online courses to Facebook, Google, and Netflix). It effectively costs nothing extra to send an email to a customer one street over vs. someone halfway across the world. Compared to the pre-internet world, sending an email to 1,000 people (anywhere in the world) vs. 100,000 people costs basically the same amount. That's the power of 0 distribution costs.

It's also not an accident that many of the traditional companies in the industries I just listed above (newspapers, media companies) have been totally decimated by the internet. Much of their power stemmed from distribution costing something and now for all practical purposes it costs nothing.

this phenomenon is called the "barbell effect" but that a whole other blog post

Well, what do you do when a customer comes to your business and starts asking lots of questions, forcing you to prove to them why they should buy your product/service/newsletter/course/etc.? 

Let's assume understand the problem your customers need you to solve, you've aligned your marketing to frame the promise clearly, and your offering actually delivers on that promise.

If your customer is still pestering you - asking for special accommodations and discounts. Looking for you to prove to them why they specifically should pull the trigger and put down their hard earned cash - it's worth considering all the downsides to giving them what they want.

Modify your marketing and you muddle up your promise to your target customers with lots of extraneous messaging or a way-too-long FAQ.

Modify your offering and you dilute the value to your best customers, many of whom are already paying for your product.

Time and attention are a few of the only finite things in this internet-enabled world of abundance. Any time you spend thinking about solving the needs of someone who isn't your target customer is time you don't spend on meeting the needs of your target customers. And if you're not the best option out there for your target customers, they'll find someone else who is. After all, they've got a whole internet of options to choose from.

Maybe you do manage to convince that tough customer to sign up for your offering. Congratulations! You've now given yourself the gift of a customer who will never be fully satisfied. Fundamentally, your offering only sort-of meets their needs (that's why they were being difficult in the first place). And they're much more likely to generate lots of support tickets and continually ask for discounts, only to churn because "they never used this thing, so why am I paying another subscription?"

Start bending your offering to internal emotional states of the squeaky wheels who speak up and complain, you'll start attracting more squeaky wheels (after all you're giving them what they want - grease, as another over-used saying goes).

Sarah thinks she needs to always make the customer happy. Don't be like Sarah.

I'm certainly not saying ignore anyone who gives you feedback or asks thoughtful or clarifying questions about what you're offering. There's value in listening to customers. 

But don't treat the customer's feedback as gospel. Use your judgement. 

There's a lot of value in responding with "it sounds like this offering isn't for you" over "let me change my offering to make you happy." 

Sometimes the customer is telling you that your product isn't for them. 

And as always, they're right.