An Ethical Dilemma of Service

Lately, I find myself struggling with one of the most common ethical dilemmas of customer service: whether it is right to give the customer what they demand or to ignore the customer’s demands and give them something that would better suit their needs.  There are positive and negative consequences to adopting either as an extreme, and I mean to consider them here.

Giving the Customer What They Want

The simplest option, which requires the least amount of thought, is simply providing the customer with what they want without any further thought and certainly no objection.  The servant merely follows orders, or the marketer does research to determine customer preferences and delivers a service to suit them.   There is no thought of the consequences: if the product the customer demands fails to accomplish their goals or even does them harm, the servant/supplier bears no ethical responsibility because he had no part in the decision. 

Opponents of this approach cite this abdication of responsibility as an ethical failure, insisting that the servant should serve the needs of his client rather than blindly following orders – if the service in question is not in the client’s best interest, the servant should refuse the order and do something he feels is in his client’s interests instead.  

Proponents of this approach cite the fiduciary responsibility to a paying customer: where the customer offers payment for the provision of a specific service, the servant is bound by the terms of that agreement to do what is demanded and it would be unethical to do otherwise.   They maintain that customers are satisfied when they get what they want and upset when they do not, so satisfying the customer’s desires is necessary to having customers at all.

Giving the Customer What They Need

The alternate option is to diagnose the problem the customer is attempting to solve and providing a product that effectively addresses it.  In effect, the servant ignores the stated orders and instead considers the need for which a product is being purchased, and if the demanded product is not the best solution, the servant provides something else.   This requires a long period of diagnosis and a great deal of effort to uncover the real problem before it can be solved.

Opponents of this approach generally blame the proponents of being egotistical and dismissive – of thinking that they know the customer’s needs better than the customer himself, and violate their fiduciary relationship by demanding payment for something the customer did not want and did not agree to pay for. And moreover, that if a customer wants a specific product he will seek it out, and switch to another provider if the one he is dealing with seems to be ignoring his demands.

Proponents of this approach believe that their responsibility is to solve the customers’ problems, not merely fill their orders.  They generally position themselves as experts whose service is providing their expertise regardless of the customer’s own analysis of the problem and choice of a solution.   They maintain that customers are satisfied only when their problem is solved and will give long-term loyalty to a firm that does so, even if it means ignoring their immediate demands.

Approaching a Resolution

My sense is that resolving the problem depends very strongly on the specific qualities of a given service encounter.  In some instances customers want a specific solution, trust in their own judgment, and are skeptical of a servant who attempts to upsell them on claims that a more expensive solution is really what they need.   In other instances, customers recognize that they do not know what will solve their problem and rely upon the expert advice of a service provider to determine how best to solve it.

Where the customer knows the manner of service he wants (a consultation in which the servant selects the solution or the provisioning of a solution of his own choosing), then the service provider can act accordingly – no expectations are violated, nor any agreement broken, when there is transparency and open agreement to the nature of the service.  Where this is clear and understood by both parties, there is no ethical conflict.

Where there is disagreement between the parties, communication and persuasion can be used on both sides to negotiate the manner of service.  And again, this openness and transparency prevents misunderstandings.   It is clearly unethical and a violation of fiduciary responsibility for the servant to do his own thing without permission, it becomes ethical once that permission is granted.

How to convince a client to go along with the servant’s intent to diagnose and solve rather than merely fill orders is a tactical issue, beyond the scope of this meditation, and likely dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the situation and relationship.   The topics of trust-building and persuasion are vast.  But in the scope of the present meditation, it should suffice to say that trust-building and persuasion are critical factors in resolving the ethical dilemma and the conflicts that can arise as a consequence of ignoring the dilemma or dealing with it in a clandestine and perfunctory manner.