[Edi]

The following is a completely personal general opinion and in no way represents the official Shrapnel Games position. It is also, despite its wording, not a reflection on any single poster here, but a more general rant on customer service and how things tend to be delineated in that field wrt specific services.

About the "Customer is always right" argument: It is usually full of crap. Very often really smelly, liquid variety of crap.

I happen to work in customer service, giving tech support to people when their internet connections go down or they have some other problem and most of them are either pig-ignorant or outright goddamn morons. Yet all of these arseholes who call me to fix their problems presume to tell me how to do my job and insist that "The customer is always right!". That particular line is the surest way to make the customer service person you're saying it to wish that you'd drop dead or at the very least bugger off and not come back. My job is to make sure that the connection from the network to the customer's DSL modem is okay so that he can use broadband. IF the customer calls and whines about his computer being infected with a virus or that he did something and now all his files are deleted or his computer broke down or whatever, I could not care less. I don't give a flying fornication about those problems since I don't get paid to fix them and I especially don't like it when idiots get shirty with me about that. Those services are provided by various other parties, including equipment manufacturers, but the problem is that most of the people demanding that service from us are cheap bastards who don't want to pay for anything.

If someone provides a service under certain terms and at a certain price, that is their right. Just because the customer demands some other kind of service, or additional service on top of that or wants to put conditions on how far he will obey the terms of service after he agrees to use the service on the terms provided does NOT mean that he is entitled to it or that he is right in his demands. If he's not satisfied, he can go elsewhere. Unless the service is unique, in which case he's stuck with it and all the crying in the world won't do him any good.

All of the above presumes that the service we're talking about is being provided as described and competently, which Shrapnel does. The "Customer is always right" whinge only has traction if the service is being provided incompletely compared to description, otherwise fraudulently or if the cutomer is being treated like crap and basically being pissed on. At which point in an otherwise competently run business the people responsible for that are going to have the management falling on them like a ton of bricks.