Down with Customer Relationship Departments!

A glance at many mission statements will usually highlight two clichés that management believe can be used to fool the people they need - staff and customers. The first is: Our employees are our most important asset!" and the other is: "We care about our customers".

The reality is that some business people forget that the customer or client is the reason for being in business! So instead of guidelines for a cliché ridden mission statement here's a guideline for a customer's bill of rights. Get staff to buy into it and learn to live the bill and you will soon find that customer relationships will improve, personnel satisfaction levels will increase and profits will move up, rather than down the curve...

The Customer's Bill of Rights

We - [INSERT THE NAME OF YOUR COMPANY] - express a desire to clearly state the principles and ideals which guide all of us in our relationship with our customers. We feel this step is necessary because we frequently find, when we are customers ourselves - either as individuals and as a company - that we are dissatisfied with the way we are treated. Disinterest, discourteousness, bad service, late deliveries and just plain bad manners are, regrettably, all too common.

Whilst we can't tell others how to run their businesses (except by not buying from them) we can and will run ours as we feel a business should be run. Therefore, the following is a list of what we consider are the inalienable rights of our customers. We expect to be held to account whenever we deny any of these rights to any buyer, regardless of size...