A client in Colima, a small city in Mexico, with whom we are working to develop a complete and integrated business online presence, introduced me to a locally recognized consultant to talk about what are doing and see if he was interested in taking his practice online.
After several hours of him talking about the philosophy of his courses and what he was doing he asked me to attend one of his courses so I could better understand it and then develop a project for him to which I gladly accepted. These courses were given on Friday 9 and Saturday 10 December, 2011. Long story short the Friday course was very good with well-defined concepts.
That day we ended up with a group dynamic in which we were asked to answer the following 10 questions to prepare us for the next day:
- Technically speaking, can you every demand of a client?
- It is affordable to meet all the customer’s demands?
- Are customers always right?
- Do you have to sometimes educate your customers?
- Must you change the product or service just because one customer tells you to?
- Do prestige and tradition ensure quality?
- Should you change your schedules, policies and rules only because a few stubborn customers tell you to?
- Is quality democratic or defined by the majority?
- Are standard products needed in order to measure quality?
- Can a product be of quality even when you don’t like it?
Saturday comes and before we started talking about the questions above, the instructor gave us the following examples:
A woman has a restaurant in Puebla . She sells the traditional “mole”, the restaurant has been serving clients for over 40 years, and she already implemented a process to ensure the quality of product. One day, a person who has never tasted mole before , comes in the restaurant, orders the mole and after tasting it. he tells the owner that the mole isn’t good, that it has no quality and that she should do the following:
- Make a custom made mole for each customer.
- Change the recipe for mole
- Sell all kinds of mole at the same price
The question was: Whom do you support?
The next example was the following:
A young man goes in his car just after 7 pm with two girls. He has no money or credit cards with him and he wants to party. He goes to the bank and sees his friend, who is manager of the bank after closing out. He asks her to open the bank because they need money to go on a spree with her friends. The friend says she can’t help him since the bank is already closed.
And the question remains: Who do you support?
The instructor asked me directly if I agreed with the customer of the restaurant and if the lady should change the recipe just because one person told her to.
My response was that while I thought that it is important to listen to the customer and learn why he did not like the mole and try to do something about it, the recipe itself should not be changed. The restaurant has already consolidated itself and made it through for over 40 years and has thousands of satisfied customers who keep coming back for that mole recipe so changing the recipe could affect the business. If something, she should try adding a different recipe to the menu.
After asking several people, some agreed to change the whole recipe while others didn’t. Just before going to lunch the instructor closed with the following statement:
It doesn’t matter if the recipe has been successful, it doesn’t matter if the restaurant has been successful, it doesn’t matter if it’s just one customer telling you to change the recipe, you MUST change it.
We came back from lunch and he asked me again what I thought about it, my response was that the woman should listen to what the new customer had to say, but she shouldn’t change the original recipe just because of that one person who hasn’t even tried mole before. You can always add other products to the menu but there is no reason to throw away the original recipe that other customers have loved over the years.
His response to this really shocked me: “That is stupid. You are an asshole”
He then turned to the public and kept saying bluntly, “even if only one person asks you to change, you MUST change, that’s what really means having a customer service culture. I once consulted a very important company that sells paint and during my lecture the owner’s son said that just because they listened to one person , they created and started selling retail, which they did not do previously.”He continued: “I also once told the owner of a restaurant that I didn’t like the “Carne Asada” he sold that he had to have more options in the menu and just because of that advice the restaurant increased its sales.”
He also stated that “money talks” and if the customer was the one who had the money ,then the customer was always right including if one told you to change your product or service completely and that meant Niches didn’t exist and there is no target market..
Anyway, what do you think?
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I think both cases, the paint company and the steak house, are clear examples of success if you listen to the customers needs, but it is clear that neither stopped selling what they already had. Neither the paint company stopped their wholesale area to focus only in retail, nor the restaurant stopped selling carne asada to sell something else,. They both added more services.