Is the Customer a False God? -- Customer—the unquestionable God

A few years back, there was an incident when a supermarket accidently sold beef of faked origins and hence needed to pay massive refunds. At the end, the frontline workers had almost sent the business to bankruptcy by reimbursing all customers regardless of whether they had bought the beef or not. This is an example of the tendency for the frontline to excessively meet customer demand, which sometimes works against the overall benefit of the business.

By a similar token, IT departments tend to consider the end-users as customers and IT vendors have to treat the user corporation as customers. The strong association of okyaku-sama (customer) and kami-sama (God) in Japan has led IT vendors to make excessive efforts to meet demands that in many cases are, of at least, questionable necessity. Such excessive customer-driven approaches to meeting near-term end-user requests have the following pitfalls ...

Read article.