The Power of a Customer

Transcript

I know sometimes people are not very nice to people who work in customer service and part of the reason is because when you have money, people want to treat you well.

Its a mutually beneficial interaction, you bring your money into a business, talk to people and pay them for their goods, services and products.

You get something out of it and they get something out of it and that means in the sense sometimes there is a power imbalance when you are purchasing these services because the waitresses and things have to treat you nicely.

And this means that its best to be extra gentle, extra aware of how we are affecting people when we purchase their services because there is a sort of power of balance.

It pays or is worthwhile to be aware of that these people are trying to accommodate us. We could take advantage of the situation and be a little mean to them and I have seen people do that.

Many years ago I had a friend who would be cruel or say these cruel jokes to taxi drivers, not really considerate of their feelings. I didn’t know what to make of it because I was young I didn’t know what was really going on.

Actually my friend was being a bully and it wasn’t nice, it didn’t reflect well on him at all. And later I learned that’s why people say that a person that is not nice to the waitress is not a nice person, even though they might be nice to you.

The other aspect of this is sometimes even if an entrepreneur or someone running the business doesn’t particularly like you, maybe they have some prejudice against your race or ethnic background or job or whatever it is. But they will still treat you nicely because they like having you as a customer.

So they’re willing to put aside their prejudices and its kind of beautiful. Its a kind of smoothing effect because over time they might well let go of those prejudices because they can see I was clearly mistaken.

I was painting with this broad brush, maybe I didn’t fully realize what other people are like and now I know. And they will be more relaxed about that.

A lot of the time we hear about the negative effects of money or the dehumanizing effect of a capitalist society and a lot of people talk about that but what about the cases where it actually humanizes us because it benefits us to think more in terms of the needs of others?

It may even result in some lasting change. Its not like entrepreneurs are just unthinking machines that are out there to get money and never think of anything else, never empathize or anything like that.

Only in the Machiavellian way do they put themselves in the boots of other people.

No of course they are human, and if they put themselves in the boots of other people, they will eventually realize those are people just like me and perhaps this is one of the reasons we are seeing a lot of peace in the world right now with certain exceptions.

I always think about the quakers in the United States and perhaps their tradition has a lot to do with the modern tradition of customer service which is you know also promoted by McDonalds and other groups.

They said to themselves, we are going to provide a good service at a good price because that is our duty as christians, we want to be be honest.

Not just honest, we don’t just fulfill what we can or get away with the bare minimum, we want people to go being happy with the products that we have. We want them to be genuinely good, not just the appearance of good but genuinely good products.

So they set out to achieve that high standard of quality, always thinking about God in the back of their mind, wanting to make God proud, wanting to make themselves proud of what they were accomplishing.

The other side of this is there’s the power of the customer also the power of the entrepreneur. When someone says no, and someone says I will not serve you.

We all intuitively know how powerful that is because we know it is in the interests to serve us. Maybe this is going to happen, in the future certain members of our society who have a large amount of power, maybe, quite soon, a lot of entrepreneurs will say no and everyone will feel it.