Is customer always right ?

It's Saturday. I received a call from Nik and she sounded agitated and upset. Nothing really upsets Nik unless it is matters relating to our customers. Nik teared a little - and I could hear her frustration over the phone on how irate she was at a customer who was being unreasonable and painfully rude. In our industry, we try our best (in fact, we go beyond the call of duty) to make sure every experience with RedRibbon Days is as pleasant as it can be. Most important of all, we want all our customers to feel happy whenever they experience a RedRibbon Days experience.

But when we already committed so much and yet customers insist on demanding more - that is when we could tolerate no more. Prior to this, I always think yes, customer is King. And being a customer myself, I demand a lot of a product or even a service. But when customers starts demanding for more than what they pay for, then I would beg to differ. Customers are not always right, but they are always insisting that they are right and we are (the service/product provider) wrong.

I am starting to wonder, perhaps I used to be like that too, until I was an owner of a business myself - and I liaised with customers from all walk of life. Some customers are really nice, and some customers are preposterously unreasonable and will say all nasty things to us to make sure they get what they want. The latter group are the ones who pays you for your service and expect a 101% percent return. They simply do not have the simple business acumen - i.e. in a business world, there are invitation to treat (Fisher v Bell) ,exaggerated marketing and of course - every word you say will be used against you.

So I came to a conclusion, not until these people own their own business, they will never fully comprehend this. They are always the group of people who always talk about customer is king and customer is always right. And they are also the group of customers that will always give you problems when they buy from you.

And sad to say, I hate to be bothered by customers like that, and sometimes I rather not have them as customers at all. If you buying from me not only gives me more headache and problems, but tears and heartache (not to mention - a loss), then I'd rather not have your business. There is no one that owns a business and not wish to keep their customers happy - but if all their customers are like the group of unreasonable customers - I'm sure everyone that owns their own business would agree with me.

Customers are not always right, but we always have to give in to them because they always think they are right.

Payment Gateways in Malaysia

On some days, I absolutely adore my job and on some like today, I loathe it. I loathe it because I'm faced with problems which are beyond my control. When these "beyond my control" problems clogged up, I wish and wish that our business is not based in a country like this. For those that own an online business, you are well aware of the need of having a 3rd-party payment gateway in order for your online business to accept credit card payment. And these payment gateway will then impose a transaction fees on each sale transacted through their gateway. And these transaction fees are shockingly high, mind you. Some payment gateways imposed a 4% transaction fee and some as high as close to 5%. And yes, RedRibbon Days happens to use the provider that charges a 4% transaction fee for each transaction.

So for a 3rd party that impose such "high-fees" on your business, you would expect them to provide the best customer service and be professional in their area of work. Shockingly, this is not the case. Our provider (whose name I had chose not to disclose yet at this point of time) had the audacity to not bear any responsibility for a technical glitch that happened earlier today. Many phone calls and emails were exchange between us today and after a heated 8 hours of "ping-pong-ball" communication, there is still no solution to the problem. We have proved on our end that there was completely nothing wrong on our end , and it is obvious that the problem is on their end - yet they have decided to sit on the fence and deny all responsibilities and adamant that they are not at fault. How can they not be at fault when they have clearly chose to perform a system upgrade on their end without notifying us in the first place? They even admitted in their email that it is their fault for not informing us of their upgrade, hence the error - yet they are not going to be liable for the problems caused. (i.e. disburse on any discrepancies)

It almost drive you nuts when you are liaising with people like that. They are almost impossible and preposterously hard to work with. This really makes me wonder about the quality of customer service in Malaysia. Are they purely "lip-service" and when it comes to crunch time to deliver the so called "after sale service" - it is simply not in within their job scope anymore?

I'm appalled with this type of customer service and makes me wonder if it is worth to continue using their services especially when you have to pay give them a 4% of each transaction made.