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.
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