Is The Customer Always Right?

It’s an adage as old as business itself, “The customer is always right.” Whatever the customer wants, they should get it. But what about the business world these days, with the Internet and Web 2.0 and social media and such — does the adage still apply?

In my opinion, YES!!!

But…

Is the customer always right?

Ok, let’s take it from the top. As web professionals we like to consider ourselves experts in our fields. Like physicians, we’ve studied the aspects of our profession and often believe we know better than the client what would work best for them. However, like a physician we have to own up to the fact that we don’t always “know” what’s best. Also, like a physician we have to accept that sometimes the patient/client can refuse our help no matter how much we might want to do so.

In the course of consulting on several lead-generation sites, I’ve had my share of fun doing A/B testing where I got to witness the folly of “knowing” first hand.

For the uninitiated, an A/B test is where you setup to alternative versions of the same basic page and randomly let visitors see either the “A” page or the “B” page. It’s sort of like playing Highlander; by tracking the behaviors and conversion rates, you can determine which of the two alternatives is better and make your overall site more effective. (There can be only one!)

Anyway, what I found over and over again in the course of my A/B testing was that my predictions on how the test would go were usually wrong. In other words, had I not done the testing then I would have implemented what I thought was the best approach only to be dead wrong. Not just a bit wrong, in some cases the difference between the alternatives was significant. What this all goes to show is that, while we do know quite a bit about this whole web thing, sometimes we have to admit that we don’t know everything.

So the customer is always right. Except…

Recently, we had a company CEO concerned about her website approach us about doing some SEO work for her. She wanted to know the cost so she could write a check and get started. (Don’t we all wish for clients like that?) After an hour-long conversation, we convince her to focus her attention in other specific directions. Yes, you read right – we talked her out of giving us money. It wasn’t that we didn’t want her as a customer, or that we couldn’t handle her business. The simple fact was that while her website could use SEO work, we didn’t feel that SEO was the best use of her time/resources. We made our best arguments towards what we thought she should be doing, and she decided that we were right.

I guess the real answer is to try to present your most convincing case for how you think things should be done, but in the end remember that the customer does make the ultimate decision. So, in that respect, the customer IS always right.

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