We’ve forgotten customer is king

We’ve forgotten customer is king

I read with interest the Elgin letter that found a lack of “thank yous” at the cash registers.

This reminded of my first business professor at NIU, Dr. Novik, who drilled into his students that the “Consumer is the King of the marketplace,” not the seller, and certainly not the employee. One wonders if corporate America has abandoned this marketing concept in their employee training?

Thank yous may be missing because good service, at all levels of the channel of distribution, is poor and getting worse. How does the beloved consumer know this? Try rolling call centers, excessive recorded prompts, broken promises, and unreturned merchant phone calls. Sellers seem to avoid the power of live human conversation to resolve problems.

One way of returning to more thank yous is for every seller reading this letter; train your employees so that they understand, that without the customer, there are no businesses or jobs. I would ask all consumers to not tolerate poor service, and maybe then, there will be fewer “have a good day” and “there you gos” and more thank you responses that the writer yearns for today.

Jim Lentz

Wheaton