INSIGHT: Doing What’s Best for the ‘Customer’ vs. the ‘Company’
I heard a radio ad a few days ago that has been bugging me, so I’m going to riff on it here. Sorry, no links or cat stories this week.
In the radio spot, the voiceover guy says in closing, “We do what’s right for the customer, not what’s right for the company.”
The second I heard that I bristled. I thought, what a myopic approach not only to running a business, but also communicating with your customers.
What bugs me is the notion that these two ideas are separate, living in two different ideological silos, one completely unaware of the other. Silo one says, “Let’s do what’s best for the customer, screw the company.” Silo two says the opposite: “Let’s take care of the company, but nevermind the customer.”
Look at Apple, Amazon, Zappos: do we not have enough modern-day examples of how the radio ad’s thinking is totally wrong?
Let’s put our Steve Jobs hats on for a second: if you take care of your customers — build a great product, provide a great service, create relationships and not just transactions — the company’s going to be just fine. Actually, way more than fine. It will thrive.
This idea is something that you hear a lot of companies espouse, but dig a bit deeper and it’s not always put into practice. Why? Gotta watch out for the company. Someone in some meeting realizes that taking care of the customer means looking at your products or services and maybe totally revamping them, because they’re not the best for the customer. And when that happens, the idea gets resistance and often dies on the vine. It gets relegated to a nice marketing tagline at best.
To us, it’s always been this: you watch out for your customers and clients, and the rest will come. There are the normal constraints of reason, of course — a smart company isn’t going to satisfy irrational, opportunistic customers — but for most cases, there’s little need to think that taking care of the customer and the business are different things.
I can’t tell you how many times we have told clients that they don’t need implement module X, or they really don’t need custom interface Y, or that idea Z would wind up stressing their internal teams despite netting us a nice engagement contract. Each time, the customer has come back to thank us for shooting straight with them, even when the money/deal/project was ours for the taking.
It’s about doing the right thing, all the time, without exception. The money we have lost by walking away from those projects has come back to us threefold when our customers refer us to other opportunities with colleagues or partners. Every time, it’s, “You guys shot me straight, and I was blown away by that. I want to introduce you to a colleague of mine who has a big PeopleSoft project in the hopper but is sick of being burned by other consulting companies.”
You take care of your customers, and you take care of the business. Same time, same thing. No difference.
As for me personally, I’d be wary of any company whose advertising talks of it being an either/or proposition. It’s crazy enough to think it, but it’s another level of crazy altogether to articulate it.
Anyway, there’s my riff. Have a great weekend, everyone.
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More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
