A late call about page five, and what the customer is right about.
Years ago I worked in publishing. One of our titles was a tabloid, and like a lot of tabloids it had its own take on the Sun’s Page Three. Ours ran on page five.
Some periods the print run went up and the printing house couldn’t keep up. When that happened, parts of the paper had to go out in black and white, usually in the second edition.
My phone number was printed in the masthead. During one of those periods, a reader called it at around ten at night. He wanted to talk about page five. It had come out in black and white, and he was not pleased. He collected those photos, it turned out, and black and white was not what he was collecting.
There was nothing to fix on our side. The printing house had the capacity it had, and the second edition was going to stay partly black and white for as long as the run stayed high. His problem was much smaller than that. So I set aside a copy of the first edition for him, and he agreed to come and pick it up from our offices in person.
The customer is always right. The line is usually credited to the department-store owners of the early 1900s, and it was a rule for the counter. Take the complaint seriously and fix what you can for the person in front of you. The store still decided what went on the shelves.
That call I received was the counter version. The reader was right that his page was worse. The printing schedule wasn’t his to set, and it didn’t need to be. His problem fit in one copy of the first edition.
This time there was no copy to set aside. Some of what they asked for wasn’t going to be built, and on several occasions we had to tell them so. A request might suit one client and nobody else in their segment. It might go beyond what the platform was for, at least at that point. Or it might be a good idea that cost too much, in which case we came back with a simpler version. Whatever the case, what made those conversations work was the explanation. We told them why, with the thinking behind the decision, and the reason itself barely mattered as long as it was explained properly.
This time there was no copy to set aside. Some of what they asked for wasn’t going to be built, and on several occasions we had to tell them so. What made those conversations work was the explanation. When a request wasn’t on the roadmap, we told them why, with the thinking behind the decision. The reason itself barely mattered, as long as the decision was explained properly.
Two famous lines get quoted to argue the other way. Henry Ford supposedly said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Nobody has found evidence he said it, and the earliest attribution turned up decades after his death. Steve Jobs really did say that people often don’t know what they want until you show it to them, in a 1998 interview about designing products through focus groups. Both lines get used as permission to stop listening.
Neither would have helped with the man on the phone or the clients in those offices. They knew exactly what was wrong. What they needed was someone to decide what to do about it, and tell them.
Sometimes the answer is a copy set aside. Sometimes it’s a line on a roadmap. And sometimes a request would change what the product is for, and the honest answer is: not on my watch. Said with the reason attached, that answer is one most people can live with.
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