The Customer is Always Right
The Customer is Always Right
One part of my job is consulting in a lot of .Net development areas.
One of the annoying things that you have when you are technology consultant is that customers think that they can demand from you almost everything (even things that aren’t part of your job role). The problem with these thoughts is that if you don’t give them the things they want they can go to your boss and complain. That means that you’ll have to answer to whoever is paying your salary about things that aren’t exactly your everyday work. Moreover, since “the customer is always right” then you’ll have to make a really good case in order to get out of troubles.
I had such an event lately when I gave to a customer details about how to create some feature by some specifications that you can find in the internet. Since this customer is using another programming language I couldn’t take part in their development cycle so I was involved only in delivering the specifications. After some time they finished the development of the feature and launched it. Of course there were problems and the feature didn’t work properly.
So what do you do when something that you developed isn’t working properly? I for example debug and test it and try to find out what is wrong with it. What this customer did? they addressed me and wanted me to debug their feature… I tried to help them by sending them information about the problem they experienced. I also found out by using a web debugger tool that even though I sent them the specifications for how to create the feature they didn’t followed them (which is a big mistake to do since the tool they built the feature for demands the following of those specifications).
A week later I was contact by the person who is in charge of the consulting session. He wanted to understand why I’m not helping the customer… I explained him what I've done and delivered him my mail correspondence with the customer. He backed me up and understood that the problem exists with the customer implementation. Now the ball is in the customer’s court and they work to repair the feature according to the specifications I provided in the first place. The customer is always right (is he/she?).