I’ve done a lot of customer service in the past and I’ve seen some successful as well as bad customer service. The reality is that good or bad, customer service can kill your business.

Of course, you want to offer good service to your customers, no matter what business sector you’re in and it’s the correct way to go. In today’s world, people expect to be treated like loyal customers and they also expect to be answered in a courteous manner. That being said, you have to expect the same from your customers and most of them don’t actually understand that.

Too often you’ll have an extremely good customer service trying to do impossible things for a bad customer. Keep your best service for good customers

Don’t take this last statement wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t give good customer service to everyone, you have to. What I’m saying is that your business don’t want bad customers, bad customers will kill your business.

By giving excellent customer support and trying to give the impossible to them, they will come back because they know they can get what they want from you.

Let’s define what a bad customer is. A really good person can be a really bad customer: It’s two completely different things. I actually met a lot of persons that correspond to that description.

A bad customer is a time consuming person that doesn’t bring in revenue. They can be extremely polite and funny but they will suck all your energy for nothing. They’ll seem like good customers at first, but they will come back, unsatisfied for reasons you haven’t thought were possible before and also with unreasonable demands.

So, what to do? How do I avoid bad customers? It’s quite hard to avoid them and it depends a lot of your way of doing business. What you can do is avoid them to come back. Don’t accept exaggerated requests and let them know when it’s the case. They’ll go elsewhere where they can meet their demands.

Good customer service is smart customer service. Be smart when dealing with your customers, listen to them and give them what they deserve: Great customer service for smart customers. It’s a winning solution in the long term.

I think the “Customer is king” thing is now over. It should actually be “The smart customer is king”. There’s too many dumb customers, don’t let them ruin your business.