By J. Dean Spence
The customer is always right. Or are they?
John R. DiJulius III, in The Customer Service Revolution, suggests that particularly since the last economic recession, companies are recognizing the importance of good customer service as, for example, a key distinguisher in a crowded market.
The values of companies seem to embrace the deification of the customer, to elevate him or her to the status of demigod. And the frontline customer service staff that deals with these deities? They are trained to be perfect little lap dogs: Fetch! Roll Over! Jump through Hoops! Goood Dog!
Okay, I am being facetious. However, nowadays it’s almost as if companies are afraid of their customers because of the power they now wield—which is largely due to the digital technology that affords customers the ability to, for example, complain about a company’s products and/or services to their (i.e. the customer’s) social media networks.
But are customers always right?
Before graduate school, I was worked at a hospital delivering and retrieving food trays to and from patients. One day my supervisor called me into her office. A patient had complained about me. Evidently, I retrieved a patient’s tray with a half-eaten sandwich on it. According to the patient’s story, it was a Second Cup sandwich—and it wasn’t even on the dinner tray. I sheepishly apologized to the supervisor who said, “Next time, be careful. Second Cup sandwiches are expensive.”
I walked out of the office and thought about the patient’s story. I thought about it a lot. And the more I thought about it I knew that the patient was mistaken.
When I retrieve trays after dinner, I always do the following: I knock on the patient’s door; I ask if the patient is finished eating; if they say no, I leave the room; if they say yes, I look at the tray and make sure no medication is on it and then I take the tray. I never touch anything that’s not on the tray, unless it is a tray lid, a coffee mug, plate etc. I have almost twenty years of experience doing the same thing.
I am one hundred percent confident that the patient was mistaken. All that I am concerned with when I retrieve trays, is the trays—nothing else in the room. And in fact, when I see things like a half-eaten sandwich on an otherwise empty tray, I always ask the patient if they want to hang onto it.
My supervisor should have given me the benefit of the doubt—and had she used Walter R. Fisher’s narrative paradigm theory to assess the situation, maybe she would have done so. It is clear to me that after careful analysis of the patient’s story, for example, it would not have passed the tests of narrative probability and narrative fidelity.
For Fisher, in Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action, narrative probability concerns whether a story “hangs together”: its argumentative and structural coherence (does the narrator present a story without contradiction), its material coherence (how does the story relate to similar stories?), and its characterological coherence (do characters act consistently and reliably) must be assessed. Here, the characterological coherence must be examined. Fisher suggests that characters must display certain “actional tendencies” or consistent behaviour or else the nature of the character will be questioned. No other patient has ever complained about me taking uneaten food before (i.e. the patient’s story lacks also material coherence), so immediately there should be a hole in the patient’s story. The reliability of the narrator should have been questioned. (More on this below.)
For Fisher narrative fidelity “pertains to the individual components of stories—whether they represent accurate assertions about social reality and constitute good reasons for belief or action.” In short, a story passes the test of fidelity if it “rings true.”
Which scenario rings true for you?
- A veteran food service worker takes a patient’s uneaten sandwich, which is not even on the tray, without the patient’s consent.
- (Bear in mind that many patients are heavily medicated, confused, and distracted by pain) A patient eats her sandwich and forgets doing so, or someone (a nurse, a visitor etc.) moves the sandwich, possibly to the unit’s refrigerator so that the patient can eat it later.
I hate to say it, but the patient is not the most credible witness/narrator. Fisher addresses the issue of reliable narrators specifically in his analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “Respecting fictive literature generally the first inference a reader must make is regarding the narrator’s reliability.”
The same is true regarding narrators of what can be called “feedback stories” like this story of the missing sandwich; vis, stories by customers that praise or find fault in a company’s products and/or services.
The values about customer service that my supervisor was upholding in this situation were, “the customer is always right.” However, if supervisors want to know if feedback stories about their employees are true, they should see if those stories pass the test of narrative probability and fidelity.
Not all complaints by customers have merit. And customer centricity should not come at the expense of patronizing and mistrusting your employees.