The customer isn’t always right, but they matter more than ever

The Harris Poll UK is a Business Reporter client

“The customer is always right” must be one of the most repeated pieces of business advice of all time, but it might also have had its day. We recently asked UK business leaders which bits of standard business advice they thought were nonsense, and 41 per cent picked exactly that phrase. I think they may be on to something.

Good customer experience doesn’t always mean giving customers everything they ask for. Sometimes customers misunderstand and sometimes they want the impossible. Meanwhile, businesses have employees to look after, commercial realities to deal with and difficult decisions to make. But I don’t think retiring “the customer is always right” means businesses care less about their customers. Rather, I think we can be too narrow in how we think about what caring about them means. Customer experience needs a much bigger definition.

Across our research, we keep seeing signs of just how demanding everyday life has become. Our recent research into family life found that 54 per cent of parents say being too tired or lacking energy gets in the way of playing with their children. Work pressures, lack of time and household responsibilities aren’t far behind. Parents aren’t telling us they don’t want to play with their children. They’re telling us that something they really want to do can still feel hard when the tank is already running low. People aren’t short of intent. They’re short of headspace.

And the same people don’t suddenly shed all of that when they become customers. The parent who is too tired to play is also trying to renew the car insurance. The person worrying about money is also trying to understand an energy bill. Someone juggling work, family and an endless list of life admin is also the person trying to rebook the cancelled train or figure out why the broadband has stopped working.

That’s the bit businesses appear to sometimes miss. There is no separate “customer”, there’s just a person turning up to an interaction with everything else in their life coming along for the ride.

Our financial services research gives us a pretty good indication of the gap: 41 per cent of consumers say financial services companies don’t understand the pressures they’re under. For a sector that sits right in the middle of some of the biggest pressures people face, that’s a problem. But I’m not convinced it’s uniquely a financial services problem. It points to something bigger about how we’ve traditionally thought about customer experience.

For years, CX has been treated largely as a commercial discipline. Improve satisfaction, build loyalty, strengthen the brand and ultimately help the business grow. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. I just don’t think it’s a big enough definition anymore. Because when people are already stretched, every bit of unnecessary complexity asks a little more of them.

It’s the form asking for information you’ve already provided. The phone call you shouldn’t have needed to make. The chatbot that sends you round in circles. The delivery window that wipes out half a day. The problem a company could have spotted before it became yours to sort out.

None of these things is a catastrophe. That’s almost the point. They’re small, everyday bits of friction that take a few minutes here, a little patience there, another decision you could really have done without.

And businesses can do the opposite too. They can make the difficult financial decision easier to understand. Spot the unusual energy bill before it lands. Make the return genuinely straightforward. Sort out the cancelled journey before you’ve opened three tabs trying to work out what to do next. Again, none of these things is going to change someone’s life. But they might make it a little easier.

Customer experience can’t solve the pressures of modern life. But every organisation gets to decide whether it adds to the load or takes something away.

When we analysed the relationship between customer experience and corporate reputation across the 100 most visible brands in the UK, we found a correlation of 0.79. Put simply, how people experience a business and what they ultimately think of that business are very closely connected.

That shouldn’t really be surprising, given that our experiences with a business help shape what we ultimately think of it. The promise a brand makes through advertising, communications and corporate positioning matters. But so does what happens when somebody actually needs that business to deliver. Whether it makes something simple or difficult. Whether it respects their time. Whether it solves the problem or creates another one.

And reputation isn’t just a nice thing for a business to have; it shapes behaviour, influences which brands people choose, return to, recommend and trust with more of their money. So if experience is helping to build reputation, it’s also connected to the things that ultimately drive commercial performance.

There is a clear commercial case for getting this right, which is why I think we need to start giving CX a much bigger role. We usually think about infrastructure as roads, railways, energy networks and broadband. The things that keep the country moving and allow the economy to function. But we’re a service economy. A huge part of everyday life now involves navigating banks, insurers, retailers, utilities, transport providers, healthcare organisations and public services. How easy those organisations are to deal with matters.

When these systems work well, we barely notice them. When they don’t, the cost lands with us through time wasted, extra effort, decisions delayed, mounting frustration and, sometimes, money unnecessarily spent. Multiply those small moments across millions of people and customer experience starts to look like something rather more important than a satisfaction score. It starts to look like part of our economic infrastructure.

I don’t mean that a decent banking app belongs in the same category as the national grid. But I do think businesses underestimate the cumulative impact of millions of people spending unnecessary time and effort navigating services that could have been better designed around their lives.

And that should change the ambition we have for customer experience. A great experience isn’t only one that leaves someone happy with the interaction they’ve just had. Sometimes the better outcome is that the interaction didn’t need to happen at all. A brilliant contact centre can still be solving a problem that shouldn’t have happened. A slick app can still make somebody navigate a process they didn’t need. A five-star complaint journey still started with a complaint.

So perhaps the opportunity isn’t simply to keep making individual interactions better. It’s to ask how much unnecessary effort we can remove from people’s lives altogether. That puts customer experience somewhere much closer to the centre of business strategy. Not as a score to improve or a function to optimise, but as a way of thinking about the role your organisation actually plays in people’s lives.

Which brings me back to those business leaders. Maybe it is time to retire “the customer is always right”. But I’d replace it with a much harder question. How much easier did we make life for our customers? Did we save them some time? Make a difficult decision feel simpler? Remove a bit of uncertainty? Sort something out before it became another job on their list?

The customer won’t always be right. But businesses do need to understand what their customers are up against. And in a world that already asks a lot of people, being a business that asks a little less feels like a pretty good place to start.

The Harris Poll UK partners with organisations to understand how brand experiences shape customers’ lives, using research and consultancy to prioritise investment, strengthen reputation and build lasting loyalty. Find out morehere.