Customer comes first, but the customer is not a king

“The customer is always right” is one of those phrases that sounds like wisdom and functions like a trap. Taken literally, it produces something that serves neither party well: a dynamic where the client makes demands without accountability and the service provider accepts them without judgment. The work suffers. The relationship sours. Both sides lose.

Customer focus is real and important. In IT services especially, the purpose of the work is to create value for the people and organizations we serve. That orientation should run through every decision—what to build, how to build it, how to communicate about it. But orientation is not the same as subordination. A doctor who tells patients only what they want to hear is not serving them. A consultant who agrees with every client position, however uninformed, is not adding value. They are performing a kind of customer service theater that feels comfortable in the short term and fails in the long term.

In the Indian IT industry, the pressure to comply without pushback is particularly acute. Clients can be remote, powerful, and accustomed to relationships where the service provider simply executes. Employees feel exposed when they question a brief, challenge a deadline, or say that a requested approach won’t work. The path of least resistance is to nod, attempt it, and surface the problems later—usually when they are more expensive to fix.

What a healthier model looks like is a partnership grounded in mutual respect. The client brings domain knowledge, business context, and accountability for outcomes. The provider brings technical expertise, professional judgment, and accountability for implementation quality. Neither side holds all the cards. When clients respect the provider’s professional standards and organizational values—the accumulated knowledge of what works and what doesn’t—the results consistently exceed what either party could have specified at the outset.

The barrier is usually trust built over time and honesty at the beginning. A provider who is willing to say “we don’t think that approach will work, and here’s why” in the early stages of an engagement is a provider worth keeping. A client who can hear that without taking it as insubordination is a client worth serving. The relationships that produce exceptional work are almost always the ones where both sides feel safe enough to tell each other the truth.

The customer comes first in the sense that their success is the ultimate measure. But the customer is not a king in the sense of having a monopoly on judgment. The most effective service relationships are partnerships—uncomfortable at moments, honest by default, and stronger for it.