UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 29Insubordinate Customers

As customers, we experience moral and direct offenses by companies all the time. But how about the other way around? Every business owner I know has at least one story of a customer gone wrong—someone they just could not please and at some point needed to cut loose.

We could look at insubordinate customers as trolls, but we shouldn't. Trolls are all about hate, and they wield it blindly in all directions. Trolls jump onto our business Facebook page, leave a comment about someone's mom, and run away. We know not to give trolls our time or energy, no matter how tempting that might be. We know not to feed the trolls.

An insubordinate customer is more work than a troll, less obvious from the start, and can be worth our time. In some businesses and some positions, every customer seems insubordinate. This job would be soooo much easier if it wasn't for those pesky customers! Right?

We become immediately defensive and try to pass issues and blame along to someone else as quickly as possible. This is where we have two options as companies: An issue brought to us by a customer can either be our problem to solve or not our problem and something to dismiss. In the best work environments, the customer is always worth problem solving for.

Most of the time an insubordinate customer is just frustrated and unwilling to follow the chain of command we've crafted for complaints. Like the strong-willed child of our business lives, the things that work on all our ...