The High Maintenance Customer

The old cliché of “Customer is always right” may have been coined during the Industrial Age. But in the Information Age, “Customer is not always right” and some of them are even abusive.

Following is an excerpt from 4–HOUR WORK WEEK by Timothy Ferriss:

“Do not over–communicate with low–profit, high–maintenance customers. There is no sure path to success, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone. Do an 80/20 analysis of your customer base in two ways – which 20% are producing 80%+ of my profit, and which 20% are consuming 80% of my time. Then put the loudest and least productive on autopilot by citing a change in company policies. Send them an email with new rules as bullet points: number of permissible phone calls, e–mail response time, minimum orders, etc. Offer to point them to another provider if they aren’t able to adopt the new policies.”

As CSR we deal with customers 40 hours a week. There are databases which indicates how many times the customers called in the past 30 days and there are those which doesn’t. If it is indicated then as CSR you already have an idea that you are going to be on a rough ride especially if the interval of calls of that customer is short. These are what we call the “High maintenance customer.” These are customers who has a lot of “inconvenience” in life. These are customers who don’t “live beyond their means.” They are the one who are trying to afford a lifestyle they can’t even sustain.

Sometimes, your job as CSR is not just “servicing the customer,” you have to be a “Genie” as well with the motto, “Your wish is my command.”

Here are some scenarios of high maintenance customers,

If you are on a cable account, you will be encountering male customers who will be insisting for their service to be reconnected because they want to watch the NBA Games but their record shows a series of broken payment arrangement promises. If you can’t grant their wish, “Can I speak to your supervisor?” would be the next verbiage.

If you are on a “post–paid” mobile phone, you will be encountering customers who are constantly on denial that they are accessing the internet using their cell phone creating an overage on their data plan and they will constantly call for those charges to be waive with the overuse word, “I am not aware of it” but notations on the account showed a series of system generated notification as well as series of call from the representative.

If you are on a “pre–paid” mobile phone, you will be encountering customers who are constantly asking for “goodwill minutes” or “goodwill text.” And goodwill minute or text are free services but if you will see their top up history or refill, they seldom top up but were just depending like parasite on the provider and if you don’t give in to their demand, they will hit you on your CSat survey.

If you are in a healthcare insurance, you will be encountering customers who are disputing their policy plan that a certain procedure should be 100% covered and that they should not pay a single cent for it whereas it is clearly indicated that their company signed up for a specific percentage only.

If you are in a financial account, you will be encountering customers who are always requesting for the interest to be waive but they shop like crazy after.

These are the “high maintenance customers.” Customers who ask for more without giving something. In local vernacular, “Hingi ng hingi, wala namang binibigay.” I have an incident where I talk to a customer for one hour and 30 minutes discussing her bill and her issue is always the same as notated on the account. She even said, “I need to know everything in this bill because I’m one hot lady!” Not satisfied, she is going back and forth on the store or with a call center representative just to get an explanation she want and an explanation she wouldn’t believe and would start to solicit for words that she would like to hear. Robert Ringer once says, “People say they love the truth but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.”

These type of customer don’t care whether others customers are waiting also. They just insist what they want. To bring convenience on their part they have to make a lot of people uncomfortable and inconvenient. Karma is just waiting for this type of customers anyway. For this type of customers, they just have one specific rule, “Do not put down the phone until you get what you want.” Thus you will hear them say, “I’ve been on the phone for an hour now and I just kept being transferred.” It is because nobody wants to deal with them anymore. And in a call center where “the highest person to talk to” is virtually virtual, they will just be toss around. I’m going to discuss about this thing on my next blog.

For these type of customer, they want to make things happen even if the company policy wouldn’t allow it to happen. They will source out one information from one site, execute that information on another site, solicit another information and when that information is not possible on the site they landed, they will rebuttal that it is all the same and you have to make it happen as if you have a “magic wand” to make it visible.

Though they are still customers, another group of people should be dealing with them because they cause inconvenience for those customers who really needs help. Companies should have call centers catering for this group of customers and should not be a call center that is outsourced.