The customer is always right? Hardly. Customers are the people who pay us, so we’re often tempted to just do as they say. “Smile and please them” is usually the quickest way to getting the paycheck, right? But the reality is that customers often don’t know what’s best for them. Here are 10 reasons why.

1. Customers don’t know what they want. Consumers in focus groups will often say they want their current favorite products, but cheaper, faster and better. They don’t know what’s possible because they haven’t seen it yet. You can’t expect them to lay out your company’s vision when they don’t have one themselves.

2. Customers get consumed by passion and ignore reality. How many times have you encountered a customer so excited by a crazy idea that they lose focus of what is best for them? Passion is a great motivator, and the best business people are visionaries, but they also need a grounding in reality to make those great ideas happen. If they don’t have realistic ideas on how to realize the brilliant ideas spinning in their heads, they’re wasting their time and yours.

3. Customers measure success in ways you might not. You met the deadline, came in on budget, and hit all the necessary points set out by the customer on day 1. So why is the customer still unhappy? This is why it’s important to take a constant pulse of the client’s true feelings along the way. Look for hidden goals that the customer isn’t sharing and be direct in asking if the project is going as she had originally envisioned.

4. The customer’s happiness is not your priority. Yours is. How can you make others happy when you yourself are not? If a difficult customer is making you miserable, you are unlikely to serve that customer with a good attitude and ultimately please him. Worse yet, that misery will influence how you serve your favorite customers.

5. Sometimes customers are jerks. As Gordon Bethune wrote in his book “From Worst to First” about his experience leading Continental Airlines: “When it’s a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?” Of course, sometimes you are the employee AND the boss, and you have to give yourself the right to feel empowered to say, “I am in the right here, and the customer is a jerk.”

6. Rewarding bad customers is bad karma. When people treat others poorly, we like to think that they get what’s coming to them. But when we reward them for being unfair, aren’t we reinforcing their behavior and teaching them to keep treating you and others like garbage? By sticking to the mantra “The Customer is Always Right” you’re giving them a free pass to be jerks with no repercussions.

7. The squeaky wheel doesn’t deserve all the grease. It’s widely known that customers are more likely to make an effort to give you their opinion when they’re unhappy about something rather than when they are pleased. This creates an unrealistic picture of customer dissatisfaction. You could be doing virtually everything right, but if all you hear are the complaints of the rare outliers, you’ll be alarmed and may set out to fix what isn’t broken. Don’t always assume that a few negative voices represent the majority. Make sure you also seek the input of happy customers, letting them know you value their opinions and their business.

8. The customer wants to think you’re a commodity. Don’t become one.
If you believe your product is best not because it is cheapest, but because you offer unique quality and insightful solutions, you should not be made to feel that the customer can get served just as well anywhere else. Don’t let negotiations boil down to just who is cheapest or quickest. You are unique. Make yourself the Apple of your market. You’re not cheapest. You’re the best.

9. Turn the saying around: The customer is wrong and your challenge is to show her the light. If the customer is presenting you with an idea you think is wrong, feel empowered to convince her otherwise. If you’re good at what you do, and have the faith and conviction to back up your reasoning, there’s a good chance that you can help the customer achieve her goals but in a way she didn’t originally envision. Of course, sometimes this effort may be futile, and you may have to resort to the final point…

10. Bad customers need to be fired. Just as it’s counterproductive to keep bad employees, a bad customer can be keeping you from achieving your goals. Getting rid of such a customer can be hard on your business in the short term, but if it lets you refocus your resources on making your good customers even happier and going after new ones, you could be better off down the road.

Agree or disagree? Tell us why.