Leading Customer Surveillance
By Chip R. Bell and John R. Patterson
“You can pretend to care but you cannot pretend to be there,” wrote Texas Bix Bender in his book Don’t Squat With Yer Spurs On! It sums up the power of senior leaders as customer intelligence officers. And any smart military intelligence officer will tell you that truth is found in the field, not in the tent!
Acme Company (not their real name) is a large, privately-held business-to-business company with marketplace dominance in their industry. Why? Senior leaders live Peter Drucker’s advice: “the purpose of an organization is to create and retain a customer.” Acme leaders know that financial prowess is a by-product of great customer service. Since customers’ needs and expectations constantly change, leaders must be in the field, not in the “tent.”
Acme hired a car service to transport visiting customers from the airport to corporate headquarters. Drivers were instructed to always ask visiting customers about their visit to Acme. While the company would never encourage drivers to eavesdrop on passengers, Acme knows drivers often overhear cell phone conversations in which Acme is the subject. Leaders hold quarterly focus groups with drivers to learn what their passengers think of the customer service they receive from Acme.
Many company’s have their senior leaders visit key customers. Acme leaders visit the customers of their competitors. How do they get in the door? They refuse to turn the meeting into a selling encounter positioning it instead as a forum to learn what Acme lacks their competitors seem to have. Several Acme leaders periodically don the uniform of a front line employee to personally serve customers. These face to face learning’s are brought back to mahogany row to inform service improvement initiatives.
Acme leaders have long known the very best source of customer intelligence is front-line employees who hear customers’ hopes and concerns. Leaders not only make rounds to watch the front line in action they hold informal meetings to learn about the good, bad and ugly. These candid sessions are popular because employees are kept abreast of changes their input triggers. The more they see improvement, the more they share. The more employees are asked for their feedback, the more they listen to and learn from their customers.
Acme leaders use customer forensics on lost customers, probing for reasons that might disclose lessons learned. When a large customer deserted Acme for a competitor, they “deputized” four employees to be service detectives. They sorted through records, interviewed customer contact people, finally hitting pay dirt when one of their security guards solved the mystery: the customer when leaving one of their district offices had complained his last shipment containing time sensitive material had arrived one day late, dramatically reducing its impact on his customer. Acme added security guards to its key sources of customer intelligence. They also added a question to their order entry process that determined if “time of delivery” was important or absolutely critical. Acme ultimately won back the lost customer.
The late Sam Walton, a practitioner of CEO as CIO (Customer Intelligence Officer) was fond of saying: “There is only one boss--the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” Customer centric leaders know that customer behavior is the source of their success. And, behavior is vibrant evidence to be encountered, not a statistic or specimen to be researched.
Chip R. Bell and John R. Patterson are customer loyalty consultants. Their newest book is Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers (NY: Wiley, May, 2009). They can be reached through http://www.taketheirbreathaway.com/.
