A customer isn’t always right, but the customers are.

For most of my life I have often misheard common sayings. Calling my mother out for drinking and driving when I was 7 because she had a cold Pepsi in the car when she was driving. She would always say back “That’s not what that means.” Well, it does to a 7 year old who doesn’t know what alcohol is and saw plenty of commercials in the late 70’s. I just figured, “Well I tried.” It just occured to me last week that the 80’s “Take a chill pill” was in fact Valium. So when I think of the term “The customer is always right,” I immediately think of working fast food and appeasing complaining "Karens”. It has taken me the last 30 years in business to understand what it actually means.

The customers are who decide if you are successful or not (unless you have a monopoly). As a business owner you only get to make what customers will buy. There are ways that we as a business can help or hurt the chances of convincing a customer. Messaging, packaging, pricing, and other dials can be adjusted to help optimize the chances of purchase once we have their attention. But in the end the customers are who decide if they are buying what we are selling.

For the past 12 years of making Slate-ish our problem has always been that we can’t produce enough. Solving the problems of scaling from handmade to manufacturing. One step forward, two steps back, as we made improvements to production. Then one day we woke up and realized that we could actually make more than we could sell. What a relief. For a few months that is.

As paths of increasing production capacity and a plateuing of sales crossed, we had done it. A real, predictable, and stable business. Finally we could rest up a bit. Then the numbers start to slip. The cost of advertising rose and performace of ads declined. Uh-oh. A whole new set of problems to solve.

So for the past year we have been focusing on making the product better. More appealing, improving our color pallette, making install easier. Adding more options. We have been sucessfull. The product is better. There are more options. It does install faster. But what we have neglected is telling our customers how our product solves their problems.

We are not salespeople, we never have been. But we must learn how to be. So we are learning that salesmanship is not just what you find at a used car lot. It is putting the customer first and solving their problems. We are adding information, making videos, and improving our website to help illustrate how Slate-ish solves customers’ problems. We hope this makes our customers more satisfied with their purchase. Our philosphy has always been to make sure customers are satisfied after the purchase. Now we are working on showing more customers how satisfied they will be before the purchase.

The customers are always right.