Five reasons why "The customer is always right" is toxic for your business.

The old saying is synonymous with customer service and Hospitality, and despite being over a hundred years old, it still seems to hold weight. At Hop, we're all about empowering teams and modernising the industry so I thought it might be good to share five reasons why I think this little old saying is toxic for your business and it's culture.

It creates robotic service.

If the customer is always right, it places the customer on a pedestal. This hierarchy then leads to the team member feeling a sense of subservience. Subservient service nearly always leads to a generic interaction from the teams to their guests. One full of fake smiles, insincere "yes sirs, no sir, wonderful choice madam" stuff, stiff body language, and an us vs them culture. Perfect one hundred years ago but not so great now.

It makes teams feel like they have no value.

Imagine you're starting a new job. You're excited; you've aced the interviews, you've got a mountain of value to add to the company and can't wait to share your creative ideas to help the business grow. Then on your first day you get taken aside and are told: "just to remind you the boss is always right…no matter what". Just think how that excitement changes to anxiety, fear or even apathy. Instead of being free to create, you become fearful of getting it wrong. All that value you've got to give slowly disappears and workdays become more about not pissing off the boss than adding value. Who wants to work for a company like that? Not me. There's no point taking the time to recruit great people and then restricting what they can do.

It creates a culture of fear and anxiety.

The notion of "The customer is always right" implies that there's going to be conflict at some point, that something is going to go wrong, or simply at some point the guest is going to kick off. It feels like every table is a potential hand grenade ready to explode. That fear removes any personality and creativity in the way the team choose to interact with their guests. Great Hospitality needs creativity, is about emotional connections; it's about genuine, authentic human communication. You can't get any of that when all you're thinking about is the fear of putting a foot wrong.

It promotes high staff turnover and sickness.

This is a pretty obvious one, but why would anyone choose to work for a company where you have no value, are stressed all the time and can't be your authentic self at work. And don't take my word for it according to A.A Grandey and his emotional regulation in the workplace research paper, putting on fake smiles and showing a different "surface" emotion to what's going on underneath leads to more stress, emotional exhaustion, poorer physical health, and decreased job satisfaction (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002; Grandey, 2003; Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011).

It encourages guests to be dismissive of teams.

Because the teams are subservient, working from a place of fear and can't be themselves, they're rarely fully present with the guest. They are already half invisible, making it so much easier for guests to be rude, flippant, or ignore the team member altogether. The more the team are dismissed and ignored, the more invisible they become, it generates this vicious cycle of teams being treated terribly.

I'm sure managers give "the customer is always right" advice with the best of intentions, but I think they believe great guest experience is just about not getting anything wrong. And a hundred years ago, perhaps that was the one key metric. But now it's so much more than that; it's about being present, being genuine and tailoring the experience to the guest in front of you - it's about authentic human connection. Of course, it takes more effort to create that kind of culture in your business, but in the long term, it's so much more rewarding, profitable and ultimately enjoyable!