So far we have covered:

• The perception that self-employed people have to work for long hours
• Self-employment is riskier than traditional employment
• You need lots of money to start a new business
• Self-employment is stressful
• Self-employment is too complicated
• Self-employed people have to do everything themselves

We continue with our series, 10 myths about self-employment and our focus today being: The customer is always right.

 “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so.” – Mahandas Karamchand Gandhi

It’s no secret that customers are the most important people in any business organization. They are the resource upon which the success of a business depends. Most importantly customer satisfaction is at the heart of the selling process. Your product or service you are selling won’t be of any relevance it you don’t have customers.

Considering the fact that the customer is the resource upon which the success of your business depends, is the customer always right?

Blanton Godfrey, professor of Textile and Apperel Technology terms this phrase as most misleading. He in fact argues that this phrase aims at making the customer feel special by inculcating into staff, who serves customers, the disposition to behave as if the customer was right.

It’s not too hard to think of many examples where customers are not always right. There are customers who bargain for prices that are way below what’s fair to the seller, or customers who get a little bit out of hand when they are not satisfied with the service they are getting, going as far as to insult the helpless staff representing the business.

As posted in qualitydigest.com, there are incidences where the customers opinion were plain wrong, a classic example being the Walkman story. Customers told the market researchers that they did not need or want a small radio to listen to while walking around. Sony ignored this opinion and went ahead to manufacture walkmans, several years down the down, most of us walk around listening to music stored in our phones, ipad’s or mp3s. A service we probably wouldn’t enjoy if Sony listened to the customers opinion.

Lawyers, who offer personalised service, suffer most from this concept. They are at times forced to attend to their clients’ needs even when it’s during a time that’s off their work day. Doing all this in the name of keeping the customer satisfied.

The unfortunate reality is a dissatisfied customer is a risk to a business. With growth of Kenyans on Twitter (KOT) community, anyone can simply post a complaint on twitter in turn paint a damaging picture of a business establishment. You have probably tried it yourself. The response you will get is overwhelming.

As Steve Pavlina, a self-help author, motivational speaker and entrepreneur, puts it, if you are self-employed, feel free to fire customers that cause you grief. Some customers just aren’t worth having.

You will interact with thousands of customers over the course of time in your business, and nearly all of them will be great, but every once in a while you will be forced to turn a customer a way and refuse to accept any business from them especially when they become obnoxiously rude, insulting, or threatening. Some think if they behave like jerks, any business will bend over backwards to help them.

Putting up with such customers is a danger to your business. For starters they could stress you to an extent that could affect your working moral and ability to deliver when serving other customers and the worst part is they could soil your business reputation.

As Pavlina puts it, if you’re self-employed, there’s no need to do business with people who think it’s their privilege to treat you like dirt.  You won’t enjoy having such customers, and you won’t enjoy the types of referrals they send you.

The phrase that the customer is always right shouldn’t discourage you from starting your own business. you are in your 20’s, this is the perfect time to go out there and establish your own business.