Customer ANYTHING.
Someone once asked Bill James, the godfather of modern baseball statistical analysis, what single point of reference was the most important in determining the excellence of ballplayers. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but his answer boiled down to: “Runs ANYTHING.” Scored, driven in, created, prevented, whatever — it’s runs that make baseball go ’round.
In business, it’s CUSTOMERS.
- No customers, no business.
- Not enough customers, the business isn’t viable.
- Not enough happy customers, the business can’t thrive.
- Not enough customers happy enough to buy again or recommend you, the business can’t grow consistently.
- Et cetera.
So in this dismal market, which businesses will win? Well, you’d better follow good practices at every turn — keeping lots of dry powder on hand, for instance — but from day to day and hour to hour, the focus had better be on customers-customers-customers, because they’re the ones who keep the cash walking in the door.
- What could you do to make a customer happier . . . right now?
- What could you do to turn a prospect into a customer . . . right now?
- What could you do to find out more about a customer’s sources of pain and what you can do about them . . . right now?
- What one phone call or e-mail could you initiate right now that would thrill a customer?
- What piece of bad (or good!) news should you be hearing from a customer . . .
- What do the higher-ups in your firm need to know about your customers . . .
- What do the rank-and-file in your firm need to know about your customers . . .
- What line of code . . .
- What tweak in wording . . .
- What offer of help . . .
- What positive tone of voice . . .
- What ANYTHING gets you closer to your customers and their needs right now?
You get the idea, but don’t stop with these dozen questions — I’ll bet you can come up with plenty more of your own. (Put ‘em in the comments!) Think, too, about what Christopher Penn wrote the other day in a post on Chris Brogan’s blog:
If you’re in management, you need to leave your office right now, put down all the reports and slides, and go talk to your customers. If you’re in B2B, talk to your customers’ customers. Get out from inside the battle and see the conflict from a different perspective. . . .
Do you see operational inefficiencies from your customer’s perspective that your product or service could address but you never realized? Have you ever watched your customer use their product or service in their real, daily life, rather than the sterile product testing and Q&A lab? What can you see if you step aside and look?
What new insights do YOU get when you make “Customer ANYTHING” your perspective?
Now, harder question:
How will you change your behavior to live up to those insights . . . right now?
I look forward to reading your answers in the comments. But if you’ll excuse me for now — I have to go take care of some customers.
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Related:
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Photo by Punch Pizza, used under a Creative Commons license.
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Here, here ! In this emergency where so many execs were caught flat-footed, are still in shell-shock, reacting with un-disciplined meat axes or not at all (60% according to a recent McK study are standing around with digitally implanted derrieres’) a focus on value delivered today is vital (life-saving/threatening) to survival.
On Bill James did you see Michael Lewis’ extensive story in the Su NYT on the Jamesian revolution in Basketball ? Worth pondering.
One HUGE company that really re-thought itself over the last four years is WMT and if you listen to the Rose interview of Lee Scott it suddenly dawns on you that it was because they quit drinking their own koolaid, starting talking outside and re-thought three decades of shibboleths. Now THAT is internally driven self-transformation.
Here’s my pass at dissecting some of what they’ve done, in context of course:
http://llinlithgow.com/bizzX/2008/09/time_to_sell_wmt_i_thinking_th.html
One warning: Managers/owners often forget that “keeping the customer first” means taking care of your staff.
As one focuses on taking care of the customer a manager can undermine the employees’ credibility, morale, and motivation.
Need an example, as a counter associate at a big mall anchor store, my wife would often be told again and again to enforce the company policies about returns, exchanges, and anything about the customer’s treatment. But when the customer asked for the manager, the manager would grant many concessions that were against policy and the associate is left to be the “bad guy”.
So it the customer still to be treated as number one, ahead of the associate? Yes, the company should. But the company should do it THROUGH the associate. The manager should treat the associate as number one so they in turn can focus on the customer. They are the ones on the front line, interacting with the customer at every turn. That’s when they should be treating the customer as a priority… all the time.
Dave — Thanks for the comment, and especially for tipping me off about the Michael Lewis piece, which I hadn’t seen.
Michael — I agree, and I like the “THROUGH the associate” formulation. It jibes with the way that Herb Kelleher et al. built Southwest Airlines: you thrill the customer by having thrilled employees.
Hmm, interesting perspective and something worth thinking about when the business is affordable housing. However, this is more to M. Cortes’ point.
EMPOWER your employees to be the throne. In other words, give your employees the power to make deals, train them on what your bottom line is and make sure that they think, but I’d rather see a deal made than an employee walk away from that deal because they can’t make it. If there is only one deal maker in the company or the only deal makers are at the management level, then the business loses. I don’t care what dollar amount limit you want to put on your employees, but give them the power to make a difference immediately.
What kind of credit can your employees give to an inconvenienced customer even if the inconvenience is only in the customers head – he or she is still experiencing it.
Last week I was inconvenienced by the Gas Company’s policies and if I had been offered a $5 credit from the Gas company immediately for the inconvenience I experienced then I would like them much better than I currently do.
My experience with their employees is that they have a script and each one just keeps reading off of the script. I get that the leak wasn’t their fault per se, but their policies certainly are their responsibility and their policy of inconvenience is ludicrous. The guys downstairs couldn’t turn my gas back on because they were not gas company employees! They could turn it off, but not on.
How is your company like the Gas company and who does the policy benefit? If the policy is about making it easier for you, for management, for reporting, for record keeping, then it is time to change your policy.
EMPOWER your employees to be deal makers and creators and watch your company grow.
[...] from the comments on the post “Customer ANYTHING”: How is your company like the [bureaucratic] Gas company and who does the policy benefit? If the [...]
One of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with very larges businesses is when they get it in their heads that everyone “needs” them, so they can just let the customers come to them and suffer with their policies. I used to work for one such company, and at the time I started with them they were pretty much the only company that offered the type of service they had. Just after I started working there some competition came along. It took them over five years to wake up to the fact that maybe they needed to start treating their customers a bit better. Worse, they actually had to see some red ink for the first time in their history before they got that message.
That shouldn’t have to happen. Once you start loosing touch with the requirement to keep your customers happy, even if they cannot go anywhere else to get your product or service, you are doomed as a company. Another businessman that I greatly respect puts a very heavy emphasis on marketing and customer service. The reason for this is because that is where the business is generated. You can have the best product in the world, but if you do not communicate with your customers and make them number one, the quality of the product won’t mean a thing.
I think this article points that out in spades. If we could just get every business to work this way the world would be a much happier place. We may not have world peace, but we would be close.
Good points, Kyle. I think that what you say about extra-large businesses carrying the attitude that everyone “needs” them applies particularly well to airlines and telco/cable companies . . . which is part of the reason those two industries are notorious for bad service.
[...] Walker at Hoover’s puts it ever so succinctly; Customer ANYTHING. Go check it [...]
[...] Customer ANYTHING. [...]