The saying “the customer is always right” dates back to the early 20th century—and it’s probably been giving employees headaches for just as long. Its precise origins are a little murky, although it’s been associated with retail pioneers including Marshall Field, Harry Gordon Selfridge, and John Wanamaker. What does seem clear is that while some obnoxious customers might like to throw the adage around as something of a blanket claim to their irrefutable correctness on any and everything, the sentiment was intended to be more about putting customers’ needs and concerns first rather than catering to a customer’s every whim without question.
That distinction—between caring about a customer’s needs and catering to their every demand—is an important one that still matters today. Sure, customers can be frustrating, inconsistent, and sometimes flat-out wrong, but businesses have a very real reason to care about their satisfaction. And that’s not just a customer-service talking point, either.
Writing for Harvard Business Review, Rachel DuRose cites a 2021 McKinsey analysis that found U.S. leaders in customer experience achieved more than double the revenue growth of their less customer-focused peers. As the authors put it, “strategies focused on delighting customers allow companies to earn greater value from their current customer base—which results in concrete financial outcomes.”
But customer satisfaction is important in the bigger picture, too. The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) says that “changes in customer satisfaction affect the general willingness of households to buy,” and notes that because consumer spending accounts for 70% of U.S. GDP, changes in customer satisfaction “also correlate with changes in GDP growth.”
Lately, however, that satisfaction has been heading in the wrong direction: ACSI found that U.S. customer satisfaction fell from 76.7 in the first quarter of 2026 to 76.1 in the second, while customer complaints reached record levels.
That brings us back to the question of what it actually means to keep a customer satisfied. Because sometimes, a customer really is wrong. Maybe they’ve misunderstood a policy, expected something they were never promised, or want an exception that employees simply aren’t authorized to make. Telling them they’re wrong and leaving it at that probably isn’t going to make the interaction go any better.
Forbes contributor Micah Solomon explains, “There is rarely value in correcting a customer when they’re wrong,” arguing that it’s “usually, exactly the wrong thing to do, especially if they’re mad as a hornet at the moment.”
Instead, Solomon says you should “stick religiously to your customer service resolution method”—and, if you don’t have one, “always start with listening, rather than rebuttal.” That second part is worth remembering, because there’s a difference between being right and feeling heard. Sometimes, simply taking someone’s concern seriously can go a long way. While the customer may not always actually be right, “you need to make them feel like they are,” Solomon says.
If you do need to correct them, Solomon suggests not leading with the correction. “Remember: They do believe that they are actually right, albeit from their own perspective. So start by showing an understanding of where the customer is coming from, and only after that, if needed, you can, like a good cop in a thousand TV shows, have them ‘walk me through that one more time.’ If your customer is truly in the wrong, let them slowly come around to that reality. You don’t gain points by aggressively pointing it out,” he writes.
