The customers are always right. For someone like me that is always on both sides of this divide more often than not, I guess I can relate pretty well with whichever way the needle goes. There are times when customers have had good reason to stand on their convictions and use the privilege of the statement above to their advantage. And there are times when it seems some customers have only come into this world to torture other people. Well, the thing is as someone doing business, one thing that will be of utmost importance to you will be the money you hope to get from the customer. Provided that money is still in their hand, you will have no choice but to agree with what they say to you. Even if they told you that gravity was only a figment of our imagination, and we were really nothing but giant piles of rock. You will have to smile and say “yes sir/ma.” How could he be wrong? A lot of things we do in this life are motivated by money. Whether we want to admit it or not, a lot of the things we find ourselves doing, no matter how we try to sugar coat it, are all because of money. We go to school, so we would be able to take care of ourselves in the future. How? By being able to make money. Many people are very selective about who they go into relationships with because they do not want to be stuck with a liability for the rest of their lives, which also finds its way to money. And also, majority of the problems many of us face is also as a result of money. Or the lack of it. That is the reason many of us will allow ourselves to go through some rubbish that we would not allow normally, just because we want that paycheck. You can’t blame us though, we have to eat, and to eat we need to make money. My mother told me one time that when buying something, you have to be sure of what you are buying before you hand over the money. Look at it very well and make sure it is exactly what you want. As long as you are still with your money, the traders will keep on pampering you like an egg, trying to keep you happy. But the moment that your money leaves your hand and enters theirs, know that they have no need to keep you happy again. They can give you whatever they want and there will be nothing you can do about it. As long as the money is in your hand, you can do all the shakara you want. This brings me to the moment I had to deal with a customer. A moment that really pushed me to the limit and I almost lost a lot of things. I’ve actually had to deal with a lot of customers over the years, right from my days as a sales rep in a phone house, and till today, I still deal with them. My story is from a few years back when I had just started ghostwriting. I had entered the game with just my writing skill, and not much sense business-wise. I had already gotten a few deals and I had delivered them, my first customers were sweet and made it look so easy. Was that how it was going to be? Well, I was about to learn otherwise. I got a customer that wanted an eighty thousand-word book, and this client had demands that were stifling. The outline for the book was scanty, less than a thousand words, which meant I would have to fill in a whole lot of things from my head. Think about it, how on earth was I supposed to be able to flesh out eighty thousand words from less than a thousand? Well, I assured him I would do it. I needed the money then, so I was willing to do everything to get it. Anyway, I gave him a date when it would be ready. And in my mode of operation, I made sure I delivered it on time. Before I started I had already taken my deposit, so when I was done, I sent the finished work to him. I was expecting him to take a few days to get back to me and then send me the rest of my pay. I was very wrong. Two weeks flew by, it wasn’t until I reached out to him that he said he was yet to even go through the book because he was busy with other things. And he could not pay me until he went through the book. Like how was it my fault he had not gone through the book? Why the hell was it affecting my payment? Anyway, he’s the customer and he still had the money. So I sucked in a deep breath and gave him the grace of a few more days. That was how this man kept putting me off until another week passed. Then he told me he had some corrections. He didn’t like some of the additions I had made in the book, and he had not asked me to do them. What was I to do? When he gave me so little to work with I had to improvise so that the story would be lively and be able to capture the reader’s heart. Apparently, he didn’t care about all that. So, I went about making corrections. Chapter after chapter, we were sending the files between us both. Eventually I got tired and told him that I was done. I know what I had written for him, and I know it was good. The money he had paid did not cover enough for him to be working me to death and for how much? I sent him a long mail that night, and although I made sure it was not insulting in any way, I also let it capture the way I was feeling then. I sent it to him. My mail must have shifted something in his brain because he apologized and then sent me the rest of my money. And to date, he is still one of my clients. My dear friends, customers can be quite difficult, being difficult is actually a human trait. But we all have to learn how to act calmly in situations that have the propensity to escalate. Because this is our business we are talking about, we might feel that they are just one customer, but we have no idea the ears of how many people that one person has, and just one bad word about our business and we would lose more customers. As I said, money is a great motivator. I learned from that my experience and I have altered the way I operate now so that something similar does not happen again and it has been going great. I still try my best to be on par with my clients, both the easygoing ones and the difficult ones. Both are important to keep the ministry moving. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, so to build a good business we have to be willing to take the high road. There is no choice. And it is my hope that when we try our best to be good to our customers, we won’t meet the ones that would be responsible for bringing down all we have struggled to build. This post is inspired by the first topic for this week which is The Customer Is Always Right. Feel free to try it out. Borderimage credit: @deimage.
Lisa Fotios
Alexander Mils
Christina Morillo
Tim Gouw
Andrea Piacquadio
Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below, I would love to know what you are thinking. Till we meet in the next post.
