Customer is King

I'm not sure if people have heard the true saying.  I've seen emails and heard how people say "The Customer is Always Right".  No.  The customer is not always right, that is not the correct saying.  Customers can be wrong, and often are.

Customers don't always know how to specify in your business language exactly what they want. They don't have the years of knowledge you have and they are thus, not always right.  It doesn't matter how wrong your customer is, it doesn't matter how right you are, if you treat your customers poorly, and not as a "king", your company Brand suffers.

I work in IT, and I have end users that come to me telling me in their terms what they want.  We try interpret that with detailed Business Requirements Documents done with Business Analysts.  In building, I guess that's the Tender document.

After that we draw up Functional Requirements, the equivalent of Site Plans.  This is so the business users can see how we intend to implement what they've asked, and how long.  They then sign this off, as they did with the Business Requirements.

After that, it's off to Technical Design and the developers - the people that write the code.  In much the same way, the tradies get told what to do.  The tradies don't talk to the client, nor does the site manager, only the customer-facing people do.

Inevitably, there are bugs in the programme - missing paint, damaged window frame - and there are things that don't end up being what the Business User actually wanted - they wanted the screen to do the functionality THIS way, but it wasn't documented well, or not at all.

I don't ever, tell the user they cannot have that.  What is the point?  For one, I'll probably get fired, but more importantly, there's my reputation.  I deliver top-end solutions in IT.  I have an obsession for quality and efficiency in the systems my developers create.  If we find that what we've developed doesn't actually meet what the Business User actually wanted, we meet with them, we discuss the issues, and we put a cost/time against it.  We never outrightly say no, ever.

When a company tells a client no, and does so just so that they are right, they fail their brand.  They get remembered as the company that wanted more to be right (self pride) than to do what is right by their customer (brand pride).  In the end, the brand suffers, and your cashflow suffers because in the modern world of social media and word-of-mouth-travels-the-globe-in-seconds, brand is E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.

In my job,  I don't ever want to be known as the person that just says no...