The CRM or customer files of companies, banks, credit institutes, housing agencies and other organisations might categorize some of their customers as high-risk customers. This might be when they belong to a discriminated group, are suspected to be criminals or because they might be bad customers which means that the have not enough money to spend.
Therefore, the company or agency either might radically try to get rid of them or secretly discriminate them until the customers leave voluntarily. There might even be a ranking for customers categorizing who is important and who is unimportant, who is rich and who is poor or who sends in too many complaints. When unwanted customers are discriminated secretly, they might endure it and lead a stressful life, or they run over to another company and service provider.
Therefore, you can call it a customer triage where unwanted, ineffective or unprofitable customers and clients are scared off for the sake of better customers. This can be done by untransparent faked computer problems. Suddenly they can’t log into their account any longer and the customer service pretends it is the customer’s fault. Or they are excluded from further information. Though this is difficult to prove and might sound from a company’s point of view like a conspiracy theory you can’t exclude this procedure. But in the end, it is the same as if a student drinks his only coffee in a café for more than an hour while other visitors must leave because there is no vacant table available. Then the student might be bullied away or even insulted. This could be practicable in other fields for other kinds of customers as well, especially for online customers. If you want to prove that true or wrong, you must confiscate the company’s computers and hard drives to search for evidence and learn the truth.
It can make sense from a commercial point of view if huge companies clean or strip down their regular customer file and reduce the number of clients and customers in total. There might even be inactive customers. But on the other hand, they might be categorized as risky or even high-risk customers for example if confidential information on a person's credit rating is involved. There was a scandal in Germany where a payment service illegally asked the German “Schufa” agency for this confidential information on a person's credit rating. It is suspected that they might not be able to pay their bills in the end.
Another reason for this company behavior might be that bad customers cost money while only the most generous or “best” customers bring in money. So, they must find a legal or semi-legal way to get rid of the bad customers and customers who always complain and waste the precious time of the customer service.
Two questions arise. Is this still fair and righteous behavior to compromise so called bad customers or high-risk customers? Secondly, when it comes to proving these accusations, whom has a data protection law to favor, the customer or the company?