Don't Take Your Customer Hat Off

“We are all customers, so why can’t we get CX right?,” is a question Craig Stoss recently posed on LinkedIn. It’s a simple question that not enough companies are asking themselves because industry data like the ACSI shows that customer satisfaction is actually declining. We are all customers of dozens of companies, large and small, in our daily lives. So why do we forget that and take our customer hats off at our jobs?

When I worked for one of the world’s largest PC manufacturers, one of our manufacturing and operations people asked me why a customer would be upset when we delivered their products two days early. Now keep in mind, these were B2B customers receiving dozens of servers and/or PCs all at once, not your regular Amazon delivery at your front door. I simply asked them: If your refrigerator delivery person told you that your new refrigerator was arriving on Thursday, but instead dropped it off on Tuesday while you were at work and had not removed the old refrigerator, would you be upset?

We had taken our customer hats off and had assumed that earlier is better, knowing that it would improve our on-time delivery metrics. But we did not consider the possibility that the customer needed to make space in their warehouse to store all of that equipment or that the loading dock team wasn’t expecting the delivery or that the IT team that was to install the new equipment wasn’t in place for two more days. Multiple experiences like this led us to look at all our internal operational metrics and discuss how we could make them more reflective of our customers’ needs rather than just pure operational performance.

Would I like this if I were a customer?

Think about the decisions you or your company make on a daily basis regarding product development, marketing content, pricing, new policies or procedures, or delivery models. What if while making those decisions, we all just thought about: Would I like this if I were a customer? If the answer is no, then there is at least one segment of your market that would not like it. And even if you would like it, or even be OK with it, would your mother, your spouse/partner, or your best friend?

That said, the problem with only focusing on our individual evaluation is that it is a focus group of one and shouldn’t solely be relied upon. While we are all consumers or customers, we have our biases, our likes and dislikes, and we don’t often represent our company’s or our product’s target market. This is why capturing sufficient customer input is critical, as is doing segmentation analysis on that feedback to look at the views of your most valuable and target customers.

Companies do a lot of things to try to make their culture more customer-centric or customer-focused. They have posters of customer personas throughout work areas and in conference rooms. They leave an empty chair at all meetings to represent the customer. But to me the best way to be more customer focused is to learn as much as you can about your existing and target customers and then remember that you are also a customer and consider that with every decision that you make.

So don’t take your customer hat off when you walk into your office! Wear it, keep it on your desk, hang it prominently in your line of sight, whatever it takes to remind you to keep the customer front and center as you make decisions, design products, implement new policies, etc.

To discuss how I can help your company’s VOC or CX efforts or to arrange speaking engagements, please schedule time with me here.

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