You probably don't need research to tell you that customers have become more badly behaved as of late, but if you want confirmation, it exists. All those headlines about rude customers, screaming airline passengers, and entitled patrons are backed up by various reports that confirm terrible customer behavior is on the rise.

What should businesses do about it? The classic approach to difficult customers is to grin and bear them.

But according to new research out of the University of British Columbia recently highlighted on the Harvard Business Review website, this "the customer is always right" approach is actually a terrible policy for dealing with unreasonable customers.

Your business relies on your customers behaving decently 

You might think the problem with forcing your employees to humor insane customers is that it burns out your staff, forcing you to hire in what, despite all the chatter about an impending recession, remains a tight job market.

And that is an issue. It doesn't take a scientific study to tell you that pretending to be nice to people who treat you abysmally is the highway to exhaustion, misery and resentment.

But that's not even the primary reason the trio of researchers behind the new findings say "the customer is always right" ends badly for businesses.

In the real world, the researchers argue, companies rely on the effort, input and decent comportment of their customers as well as their employees.

"Frontline service work often involves coproduction – for example, when customers must know and explain their preferences (to a hairdresser, server, massage therapist, architect), provide account details (call-center interactions, financial transactions) and express their desired changes to products or settings (IT, cell phone and television support)," they write.

"Quality customer service requires both participants to provide input and collaborate."

When your customers have gone so feral that they can't hold up their end of these interactions, not just your employees but your business's bottom line will suffer.

Smiling through their antics just reinforces bad behavior. What you need to do instead, the researchers contend, is train your customers to behave better.

How to train your customers 

How do you train your customers? As much as you might like to resort to shouting (or on your worst days, a cattle prod), that is, unsurprisingly, not what the research suggests.

In the HBR piece the trio of business professors offers detailed advice, but their approach boils down to four steps that mirror how you already train and manage your employees:

Choose your customers: Unless you're the size of Google, you probably don't serve literally everyone. So the first step to well behaved customers is setting expectations and electing not to work with those that don't meet them.

This "can take the form of letting uncivil customers know that you are too busy to serve them or not taking new clients. You can also signal that your organization values frontline workers – and won't tolerate their mistreatment – through product design and marketing, which will help you attract customers who will also adhere to that culture and those values," write the researchers.

Train them to behave respectfully: This can look like those signs you see everywhere from fast food joints to airport security screening lines informing customers that incivility will not be tolerated.

Or you can get more creative: "In Korea, some call centers ask customer service workers' loved ones to record messages or ringback tones that are played before connecting customers to those employees. It is a reminder that the ensuing interaction will be with a real human being."

Evaluate customers too: It's not just staff that should have their performance evaluated.

Many businesses from Uber to Airbnb to some restaurants rate their customers formally and systematically, but even small companies can provide "employees with the ability to indicate when an interaction with a customer has been problematic," the researchers write.

Progressive discipline and dismissal. Flagging terrible customer behavior is the first step, but when customers repeatedly ignore warnings, you must also empower employees to walk away.

At a call center that could meaning giving your team the right to hang up if faced with continuing verbal abuse or it could mean allowing "employees to escalate by making a note on a file, redirecting the interaction to a supervisor and even issuing fines (depending on the industry)," the researchers suggest.

If all of this sounds a bit familiar, that's probably because this approach echoes how companies manage employees – they set clear expectations, provide training and feedback and ultimately deal out consequences if those expectations aren't met.

The latest research suggests that rather than treat customers like they're always right, you should manage them much the same way you do the rest of your team.

 

Inc