Demanding Customers

There is more to demanding customers than meets the eye. Identifying their different shades will make a big difference.

There is more to demanding customers than meets the eye. Identifying their different shades will make a big difference.

“Fire 70% of your customers and watch your profits go up.” Is what Seth Godin Author of the best selling book Permission Marketing says. While Seth is referring to the need to focus on narrower customer segments and customizing services to suit individual customers, the word “Fire” got me thinking of customers whom one would gladly like to fire. Don’t get me wrong, not all ‘Demanding’ customers deserve to be ‘Fired’. There are a set of customers who are instrumental in increasing the service standards, such customers need to be nurtured, taken special care of and one needs to have an ear exclusively turned in their direction to hear their suggestions and demands.

Broadly speaking I could classify demanding customers into three groups, the Habitual, the Crafty, and the Winner.

This anecdote from Readers Digest, illustrates best what I mean by a Habitual Demanding Customer.

“I’m a front-desk agent on a cruise ship and accustomed to people complaining about their rooms. One guest, however, came straight to my desk after boarding to complain he did not have the ocean view he had requested. He demanded that he be moved at once. I checked his cabin number and found he did indeed have an ocean view. He then objected that when he looked out of his window, all he could see was the car park. I had to remind him we hadn’t left port yet”.

The best way to handle this customer is to humour him, and politely resolve his demands. The customer does not really mean any harm nor does he have a bigger picture for making the relationship more productive, He demands more because “he has the right to do so”.

With the Crafty kind one needs to be really careful. Like this customer of my friend who availed of the service and later refused to pay saying that there was no proper contract asking for the payment. These are the kind of demanding customers who plan to take you for a ride, hiding behind the fine print of a contract, legalise, jargon and pretensions. They treat the business relationship as a one-way street, where they need to gain and make the other person lose. Crafty Demanding customers will keep pointing out imagined or real flaws in the service solely for getting the better of you to make or save a quick buck. They delay payments, renegotiate pricing after the service has been given and generally become an irritant. It is worth “Firing” such customers, because addressing their demands does not improve the quality of your service, it only increases a lot of paper work, fine-tuning of contracts and creates a defence mechanism in the team which might in fact hinder great service to other customers. Identifying such “loss making” customers and getting rid of them can save a lot of time, energy and patience for the organisation.

However, there are a set of demanding customers I really like to spend time with. They ask tough questions, they do not accept shoddy service, they raise the benchmarks but while they are doing this they accept your genuine constraints and a lot of times even coach you to become better. For these customers one needs to roll out the red carpet. They are the ones who will make your service standards so good that all the other customers would benefit from it. These customers are your best fans and your worst critiques at the same time.

They are the best kind of customers to have. I call them the Winners because while they are getting what they want from you they are also helping you improve and are also making sure that you do not lose on their count. With such customers we need to realise that they are spending time and energy by giving feedback with the intention of improving your service standards. It is worth investing in them.

It is very easy to categorise all difficult customers in one basket and run the risk of firing all of them. By now the reader might be thinking that very few have the luxury of firing customers. But look closely and you will notice that we subconsciously do so all the time, either by not giving sufficient time and resources to a customer whom one does not like, or in the conversations that team members have internally, while deciding on priorities etc. So the risk of actually alienating your “Winner Customer” is real if one does not distinguish him early and take proper steps to ensure that this customer gets attention and resources. The way to identify this customer is from his actions and his motives. This customer raises genuine issues, does not hide behind legalise and his actions are in sync with what he says to you.

The real irony is that though the Crafty customer wants to get the better off of the relationship it is the Winner Customer who actually ends up getting a lot more than he paid for. Business after all is a two way street.

For feedback send mail to thespark@businessgyan.com

Issue BG32 Nov03