Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

For about 30 years I've been in the customer service business, one way or the other. One thing I've learned over the years is there is an occasional time when someone who buys something from you really isn't a customer.

I think that's similar to the lawsuit filed by bride-lawyer Elana Gatt, who claims Posy Floral Design, which provided the flowers for her wedding, were in breach of contract because the flowers were provided were the wrong shade. She sued them for about $400,000.

Evidently before the lawsuit, she sent a series of emails to Stamos and Paula Arakas to get a $4,000 refund. The Arakas refused, saying it “felt like extortion.”

One place, the couple is reported to have talked to Glatt about it, quoting Stamos Arakas as saying, "he and his wife, Paula, had done their best to match the color of the hydrangeas with a picture Ms. Glatt had given them, but explained to her that because of the vagaries of nature and the lighting at the reception, the colors might not look exactly the same."

I understand this argument, as I used to run a large home improvement business, where very similar conversations took place concerning paint and how it could look under different lighting and circumstances, so that rings true.

The point here is there are times when people who are doing business with us may really not be customers, but simply people doing a transaction with us. The lawsuit here shows there was no strong relationship between the business and the people they were doing business with.

While we must have serving our customers one of the top priorities in any business, we do need to have a working definition of a customer. It's not as simple as saying it's anyone we do business with; that's just not true. Most the time it is, but we're talking about exceptions here.

What are the exceptions? I think it's in how people want to work things out with you. Do they really want the situation taken care of? Are they trying to get far more than the problem warrants? 

There are some people who simply don't want to work things out with you. They aren't trying to give you an opportunity for you to make it right, they're only trying to attack you or those who work for you and get the most out of a mistake they can.

What I'm saying is we must differentiate between the two, not for legal purposes, that's entirely different, but for service purposes. If someone refuses to be helped, all we can do is let them rant, take care of the problem, and go on from there. Most the time these people want to punish you, whether you were in the wrong or not. Trying to placate them won't work, they don't want to be placated, they want to hurt you or someone working for you. To me, that's not a customer.

You've probably met or had someone you've had to deal with like this. Again, we need to make things right, whether they want it or not, but we still need to ask ourselves if this is a customer, or an exception that would be better for us not to do business with.

It can be very discouraging to our people if they've been wrongly accused of poor performance and are made to suffer wrongly. We need to understand that we'll occasionally come across this type of person in our marketing and service. In the end, I don't think they should be considered a customer, nor should be attack our people based upon irrational, hateful behavior. These types of people will hurt us badly if we consider them legitimate customers.
 
I'm not saying the example at the beginning of this post is such a situation, but it does show there was some type of disconnect between the floral shop and the wedding party. It remains to be seen if it was legitimate failure, or a person simply trying to get money out of the deal.