The customer is always right

Last week I attended a workshop on customer service and how a customer can single handedly turn the fortune of any company around to the worse of course. They mentioned statistics regarding word of mouth and it's effect. For example if one client is unhappy, he will tell an average of six people, whilst a happy customer will not talk. So as the saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, companies are doing just that, most of the large organisations are now buying systems that track customers' complaints and try to solve them to avoid negative publicity; the systems are not only through phone calls, they involve chats, all the social media and also point of sales solutions.  Apparently the loses of any complaints are in the billions, so to gain back these billions, the companies are even giving back to the clients in terms of after sales services, discounts on future purchases and freebees.  

We can apply this theory on any organisation. This can be a school, a supermarket, a B2B website, a large government organisation, a house with a family living in it and of course on countries.  I think if everybody took care of it's customers in one way or the other, everybody wins.  We in business schools teach our students that win-win is the name of the game, every student once he/she is working for an organisation should work really hard to make the organisation a success, and in turn that will mean he or she are successful too, and the whole community will benefit from that success.

But, look at the reality of things? Can this be applied to the world. I dare you to do this research, just take a pad and a pen, and stand near the escalator of any shopping mall, ask every one that comes down if he or she have a complaint about anything? And the answer should be yes or no. Do you want to bet That 9 out of 10 Will say YES? We all have complaints! We all want our complaint to be resolved without bias and without linking us to any ulterior motive. 

How do we achieve this role.