"The customer comes first"

This phrase is considered a bedrock principle of American capitalism, but it really isn't. If the customer came first, you would hear a human answer the phone instead of ending up in phone tree hell when you call a major company. If the customer came first, the return envelopes for your bills wouldn't have advertisements attached to them -- do these companies expect us to believe that they surveyed their customers and discovered that, yes, their customers want to be annoyed by these things once a month?

Of course the customer doesn't come first. The customer gets exactly as little as the company can possibly get away with while still snagging the customer's money. And sometimes the company can get more money from the customer by making his life hell -- for example, by having a "customer retention" policy that makes it all but impossible to cancel an ongoing service. Yes, you can cancel, but only after waiting an hour on hold and then enduring endless sales pitches from a rep who is not allowed to push the "cancel" button until you've been read every page in the notebook. After all, you are on the way out, so what bottom-line harm could there be in pissing you off this way? Maybe you'll become so pissed off that you'll hang up and remain a customer.

No, the customer doesn't come first with most companies. I am reminded of this by our customers' reactions when they deal with Beyond Belief Media. When someone contacts Beyond Belief Media to complain that the DVD they ordered didn't arrive, or it arrived damaged, we have a firm policy: send a new DVD right away, no questions asked. We don't even ask for damaged items to be returned. Customers are often shocked at our response. Dealing with the horrible customer service of other companies has led them to expect a nightmare when they try to correct a problem. They don't expect one brief email to solve it (and often their emails show their expectations, with preemptive angry tirades about what they mistakenly anticipate our reaction will be), and they don't expect Hal, who handles customer service, to be so friendly and accommodating in his response.

Business leaders may say "the customer comes first," but the concept of actually caring about the customer is totally foreign to most of them.