Your statement is absolutely bad business.
Business is about making logical choices given information present and past experience. It is not about giving preferential treatment to one customer over another.
Yes treat the small fry with respect, but treat the yacht guy extra good. Considering the yacht guy probably brings the same $$ to your company as 100 of the tug boat guys. To demand the same service for a fraction of the business is absurd. Businesses routinely give special treatment to big customers and they should.
Any given business only has X amount of money to allocate for service needs. Every dollar you take away from tugboat will be spent on yacht, but then don't be surprised when tugboat leaves and tells his ten buddies.
Are you seriously going to tell me that you would not service your million dollar account right away because you wanted to provide the best possible experience to your $100 customer that just walked in? The big customer needs something special like after hours service you say right away. The small guy might get it if you had the time, and it was not too much of an inconvience. The big guy needs a million parts right away, you get the factory working on it, perhaps delaying small orders, working them in as you can.
It is like working a second job for some extra cash. Your main job pays you 2x as much and needs you to work this weekend if possible for overtime. Are you going to tell your main job boss that you can only work 1 day for them this weekend because your second job needs you and it would not be fair to the second job?
Your big customer has a complaint? You listen and work to correct it right away. Your small customer complains and you work to correct it also, but it does not have the priority.
I stated an ideal situation which is not how Corporate America operates, but did so to illustrate a point. Customers expect equal treatment and priority from their provide be it E* (for purposes of this forum) or D*. Then customers are absolutely shocked and dismayed when they're $34.99 a month account is blown off for a commercial install running $2,000.00 a month.
I believe in the above, don't get me wrong. Customers should absolutely be treated no differently based on expenditure. That they are is a fact of current financial standing and the economy, but nonetheless, customers should be treated equally and fairly. But why is it so easy to make an argument to the contrary? Across the forums you read about customers who are upset E* didn't take them back with arms wide, or how they didn't get that 622 (the third they wanted) and instead it went to the customer who already had six in his 10,000 sqft home.
People yell, kick, scream, steal, lie, cheat, kill, murder, maim, bite and claw to get what they feel entitled to, but at the end of the day, the company will always service the highest income account as a priority. I just thought it interesting that someone else would also quite plainly say so. There's just a large number of bleeding hearts around, and people forget that most of those in the satellite business are there for just that, business. To turn a profit. Customer service isn't dead, it's expendable depending on how much your account is worth.