The customer is king! Yeah, right.

My partner at the time, Stella, and I were enjoying the warm spring evening over a seafood dinner and a glass or two of Chardonnay. The ocean glittered below us as if snow had been scattered on its breathing surface, catching the evening sun as it dropped to the western horizon. It was the quietest, most intimate moment, the silence fracture by the pebbles racing down the beach and sounding like distant fireworks.

It was Stella’s birthday. Maybe it was because it was a significant, zeroed, anniversary that Stella wasn’t happy. The wild barramundi wasn’t cooked on the inside and it was too gamey. The snow-peas and asparagus had turned to slush. The jacket potatoes had been micro-waved, not oven-baked. The candle at our table was so heavily scented that the food’s aromas and flavours were overwhelmed. The Chardonnay was unwooded and hadn’t been chilled long enough. The service was slow and unprofessional.

Maybe, you are thinking, I should have chosen better a better restaurant for such an occasion. You are wrong. We were dining at home. I had devised the menu, selected the ingredients, and prepared the meal with love and a deep, deep, desire to please. I’d dressed the table and set it on the balcony over Stella’s beloved ocean, but Stella was complaining as if someone had stolen her children or bitten the head off her caged canary. I had done my best, and it was not good enough; I had acted thoughtfully, but that too was inadequate.

At first I was disappointed; anger kicked in after my conciliatory efforts were rejected; rage bubbled to the surface as I gave up on the dinner and what might have been a happy future together. I told her to get nicked and went down to the pub to drown my by then not inconsiderable sorrows with a few friends – male friends. They listened and commiserated, as I hope you are doing too, and offered advice as men are wont to do.

Stella’s constant whining and whinging, moaning and misery, that night, destroyed any sniff, skerrick, or scintilla of remaining affection I had for that crabby, intemperate, shrew. It was over.

I tell you this story because I feel that the ‘excellence in complaints-handling’ movement has swung too far in the direction of the complainant. A complaint is a gift – don’t make me laugh (in my case, I’d cry). You might as well say that the V2 rockets that rained down on London during WWII were a gift from Germany. Have we completely lost track of the service provider’s perspective?

By and large, people in customer contact positions do their level best, often with totally inadequate training, skills, support and resources. The service delivered to a customer is the output of a service delivery system that comprises people, processes and technology. Underperformance of any system component puts the overall customer experience at risk.

Maybe the chef had a heavy night on the corn syrup, maybe someone forgot to call the butcher order the wagyu beef, maybe there was a plumbing malfunction. It is the poor customer contact person who has to engage with the customer and let them know why there will a 40 minute delay before the main courses can be brought to table.

Service personnel deserve our respect. They may be minimum wage school-leavers gaining work experience before joining the backpack trail to Queensland, and they are almost universally undervalued by senior management who fail to recognise that they are very often the single most important value-creating or value-destroying element of the customer experience. They put up with a lot from self important, rude, customers like you and me (well, me, actually), and very often burn out.

You’ll know that staff in front desk roles in banks have to be rotated out to back office roles every couple of hours, and that call centre staff have to go and lie down in a chill-out room, and gaze at the fish in the illuminated tank before creeping back to their cubicles, refreshed and ready to do battle on more time.

You may have seen the revelatory TV series, Back to the Floor, in which senior managers take on operational roles at the bottom of the organisational pyramid. I recall the CEO of a catering business who ran the business by the P&L statement and the balance sheet. Running the business, for him, was an abstract exercise in cash flow management; he really had very little idea what the company did and how it created value for customers, and therefore of how it managed to survive and prosper. Indeed, he had no idea what the customer experience was like. He had never been in the front-line dealing with easy customers, let alone the difficult ones, those who all think they are uniquely important and who routinely fail to understand that the service person has already dealt with 200 customers, all of whom feel the same way.

The CEO stuck it out for a week, professed that he had a new respect for the lowest levels of the hierarchy and their role in creating customer experiences that made the cash flows look good, and then headed back to the boardroom. I don’t remember him promising he would provide the resources and support for the lower levels to create great customer experiences. Of course, if they don’t create great customer experiences, then he can forget about making sense of the financial statements, because there will be none.

There is a lot of guff, balderdash, twaddle, poppycock and rot uttered about customers, much of it based on ignorance, foolishness or self-interest. The customer is king! The customer is always right! Rubbish. How about a revolution that privileges the server over the served? It’s about time!

Stella is now happily married to her servile companion for whom service means servitude. Yes, we are both better off.