Most people have had a version of this experience. You phone a business with a simple question: can this be returned, when will the order arrive, is this covered. The first person says yes. A week later, a second person says no. A third person, reached by email, says it depends, and asks you to explain the whole thing again from the beginning.
Nobody in the chain has necessarily done anything wrong. Each answer may have been given in good faith. But the customer is left in an odd position. They are no longer asking the business for an answer. They are trying to work out which of the business's answers is the real one.
This piece looks at that position: what it takes from the customer, what it takes from the staff giving the answers, and what a business can do about the conditions that produce it.
How one business ends up with several answers
Inconsistent answers are rarely a sign of careless people. They are more often a sign that the knowledge needed to answer has never been written down in one place.
IBM's explainer on knowledge management draws a distinction that helps here. Explicit knowledge is information captured in documents such as manuals, reports and guides, and can be shared easily. Tacit knowledge is acquired through experience, is understood intuitively and is difficult to articulate or transfer. In many small businesses, the rules that govern customer questions are largely tacit. The long-serving salesperson knows which supplier will accept a return after 30 days. The newer administrator does not, and answers from the written policy, which says no.
Several conditions tend to widen the gap:
- Policy has drifted from practice. The written terms say one thing; the exceptions the business routinely makes say another, and only some staff know about them.
- The customer's history is scattered. One person sees the email thread, another sees the account in the accounting system, a third sees a WhatsApp conversation on their own phone.
- Discretion has no boundaries. Some staff feel able to make a goodwill exception and others do not, because nobody has said what is allowed.
- Answers are never fed back. When a difficult question is resolved, the resolution stays with the person who resolved it.
The business-side pattern is explored in Mellorca's piece on when service quality depends on who picks up the ticket, and the cost of fragmented customer records in customers repeating information across disconnected records. Here the question is what the same conditions feel like from the other side of the counter.
An illustrative case
Consider an illustrative example, not a real case: a Cape Town furniture retailer with two showrooms, an online shop and around thirty staff. A customer buys a couch online, and it arrives with a damaged leg.
The customer emails and is told by the online team that a replacement leg will be couriered within a week. Ten days later, nothing has arrived, so they phone the nearest showroom. The person who answers cannot see the online order, and suggests the customer bring the couch in for assessment. The customer, now confused, emails again and receives a reply from a different colleague offering a partial refund instead.
Each response is reasonable on its own. Together, they leave the customer holding three versions of the business's intention and no way of knowing which one will be honoured.
The human tax: confidence and dignity
Two costs stand out, and both are hypotheses grounded in the mechanism rather than measured findings.
The first is confidence. A customer who receives conflicting answers can no longer rely on any single one. They may start keeping their own notes, saving screenshots, naming the person who told them what. They become, in effect, the record-keeper for a business they are paying.
The second is dignity. Having to repeat a story, and then to point out that someone else in the same company said something different, puts the customer in the position of a complainant or a negotiator when they only wanted an answer. Some people handle that easily. Others find it draining or embarrassing, and some simply give up and absorb the loss. It would be wrong to say that every customer experiences this the same way. It is fair to say that the burden falls unevenly, and often on those least comfortable arguing.
Staff pay a version of the same tax. Being contradicted by a colleague in front of a customer is uncomfortable, and so is being asked to honour a promise you would not have made.
There is also a fairness question. South Africa's Consumer Protection Act exists, in its own words, to promote a fair, accessible and sustainable marketplace. Legal compliance belongs with lawyers, but the principle is worth noting: when a business's answers depend on who you happen to reach, customers who push harder can end up treated differently from those who do not.
What could realistically change
The interventions are mostly about turning what a few people know into something everyone can see.
- Write down the real policy. Not the policy as it was drafted years ago, but the rules as the business actually applies them, including the common exceptions.
- Keep one record per customer issue. A shared case or ticket, visible to whoever picks up the next call or email, so the second person can see what the first one promised.
- Define the limits of discretion. IBM's guidance on customer service describes the value of centralising responses to recurring issues while still allowing representatives to use judgement within agreed limits, and gives the example of a bank that let agents resolve issues below a set value on their own. A small business can do the same in plain terms: what any staff member may offer, and when a decision goes to a named person.
- Feed resolved questions back. When a new kind of question is answered, add it to a short shared answer list. Over time this becomes the business's working knowledge base, and the basis for proactive communication that removes repeat questions.
Technology helps when it makes these things the default: a shared inbox or helpdesk tool rather than personal mailboxes, a customer record visible across channels. But the decisive step is a management one. Someone has to decide what the answer is.
The first consequence, and the business outcome
The immediate change is that the second person to speak to a customer knows what the first person said. Contradictions become rarer, and when a decision has to be changed, it is changed deliberately and explained rather than discovered by the customer.
The business outcome is fewer repeat contacts, fewer escalations and fewer goodwill concessions made only because the business contradicted itself. Staff spend less time reconstructing history.
The human dividend
The dividend is predictability. A customer can ask once, receive an answer, and reasonably expect it to hold. They do not have to keep the business's records for it, or argue their way to consistency.
That returns a measure of dignity as well. Being given a clear answer, and having it honoured, treats the customer as someone the business is accountable to, rather than as a problem to be passed along. For staff, it means being able to give an answer with confidence that a colleague will not undo it.
The trade-offs
- Consistency can harden into rigidity. A written policy applied mechanically may remove the judgement that once produced generous outcomes for customers with unusual circumstances.
- Writing things down takes time. Small teams often feel they have none, and the benefit is only visible later.
- Shared records raise privacy duties. A customer history visible to more staff must be handled with more care.
- Experienced staff may feel diminished. If their knowledge was their value, codifying it needs to be handled as recognition rather than replacement.
Why it matters
A business that gives different answers to the same question is not usually dishonest. It is usually under-organised. But the customer cannot see the difference, and they bear the cost either way.
Mellorca's interpretation is practical. Consistent answers are less about training people to say the same words and more about giving them the same information to stand on. When the knowledge lives in a shared place, customers can stop being the business's memory, and staff can stop contradicting one another without meaning to.
Sources and further reading
- What Is Knowledge Management? - IBM (last verified 10 October 2026)
- What is customer service? - IBM (last verified 10 October 2026)
- Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 - South African Government (last verified 10 October 2026)
Related Mellorca reading
- When Nobody Can Say Which Number Is True
- The Employee Who Needs Permission for Every Small Fix
- When the Out-of-Office Reply Doesn't Stop the Work