The Customer is Always Right! Well, Maybe

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

The notion that "the customer is always right" is a trait that sets apart the companies that truly make customer service a priority. For these organizations, going the extra mile to make customers happy is part of their corporate identity. They view this customers-first philosophy as not only the right thing to do, but also a contributor to their long-term success.



But sometimes customers take advantage of a company's good graces for fraudulent purposes, or they can make costly mistakes that lead to the company unfairly footing the bill. This is especially true in an online environment, where it can be difficult to know exactly what an application displayed on the site and how the customer interacted with it. It's hard to know who was right, and yet quite a lot of revenue can hang in the balance from these sorts of issues on any given day. Worst of all, a lack of visibility into online behaviors can make graciousness a very costly virtue.

Let's take a look at an example from a Tealeaf customer that operates a stock-trading platform. Customers sometimes would lose money with stocks that they had invested in. They would try to get out of their losses by calling the call center and saying "I never purchased that stock at six dollars per share. When I purchased it your application said that it was only five dollars!" Even when this business had back-end data—trade records in their database showing the correct price of the stocks in question—they still couldn't successfully refute the claims. The customers trying to wiggle out of their losses would hire attorneys who would ask "Can you prove what your application stated during my client's session? Your back-end server data doesn't prove that the correct information was displayed on my client's screen."

This company was in a bind. In the end, it was easier for them to just issue a refund than to fight these sort of claims with limited proof. The problem was that there were hundreds if not thousands of these little claims. The company was left wondering what it could do.

Enter Tealeaf and cxVerify.

In addition to the many wonderful benefits around web site optimization that the Tealeaf Customer Experience Management solutions offer, Tealeaf cxVerify has the unique ability to improve dispute resolution. The Tealeaf CX platform records every single web session in its entirety and can turn the desired sessions into pdf documents that can be shared externally. The Tealeaf session replay is preserved for anyone to see what the user clicked on, what data he or she entered, how the application responded and what content was displayed. Disputes about what the user's screen showed vs. what the application recorded can now be a thing of the past. Furthermore, these documents have been successfully entered in arbitration to mitigate fraud claims, as in case of the online trading company. They've also been used simply to show that a customer was right—that they were offered free shipping on the pair of shoes that they ordered but they were charged for it anyway—reducing the time to resolve an issue and preserving customer goodwill.

I have a feeling that even when we can see that the customer is incorrect, many of us will still go out of our way to make the customer happy. At least Tealeaf cxVerify allows us to be in control of our good graces.