If you are part of a business where you serve people or you build a product for people, do you believe the customer is always right? Or do you believe customers are often wrong and it is your job to let them know and roundly reprimand them?
The great Bill Gates of Microsoft has a reputation for being hard on his employees: He can be tough and nasty. Gates, however, never blames his end users when something goes wrong with his product — or is perceived to go wrong with his product.
Bill Gates knows the end user wants the product to work — that’s why the product was purchased or installed in the first place — and he will listen to them and be supportive of them and then give his team a knockabout time to get those issues fixed for them.
Many times the fault is within the end user but that doesn’t mean the business service or product can’t try to predict behavior and protect itself from the coalition of the unwilling and the willfully unenlightened. An end user immune product or system of services is the golden grail every company yearns to provide, but that journey begins with: “The customer is always right” — even though that may rarely be so.