The CX Blog

A while back (thanks for the tip, Bri), Ask the Wizard posted an article about his recent experience flying with an airline that-oddly enough–was delayed, and a hotel that was excellent. The airline touts its customer focus at every opportunity–in advertisements, on its website, on the tickets themselves. The hotel, conversely, makes no mention of their customer focus at all on the website or elsewhere.

The hotel’s customer centricity was simply baked into the entire company, from its processes to its technology to its people. The customer focus was clearly a cultural imperative.

The Wizard’s conclusion is that there is a clear distinction between what companies say and what they do, and companies that actually do the customer focus thing don’t need to spend a lot of time talking like they do.

I pretty much agree, but would point to some mitigating factors with certain examples. Dell, for example, really did have customer focus in the early days–they were widely recognized by actual users as being phenomenally responsive to the customer. Exponential growth and some lousy decisions along the way managed to hit them broadside and they were reeling for a while. Recently, they have begun a new program of actually listening to their customers–through blogs and forums–and have taken steps to rebuild their customer infrastructure. Will they turn it around? Time will tell, but credit where credit is due: they’re listening.

The Wizard makes two really, really good points in his post:

1. The company only has one constituency, customers. How many times have we heard executives make statements about ’stakeholders’ and ’several kinds of customers, including our shareholders, industry partners, blah blah blah’. Companies that think they answer to multiple entities answer to customers last.

2. More information is always always always better than less information, aka Transparency. Businesses that provide outstanding customer-service have employees that all know it’s ok to provide the customer with more information. Airlines, for some reason, are absolutely horrible at this. You can be sitting in a gate area for a delayed flight with an unknown departure time and get absolutely no information.

We got to the hotel, the room’s not ready. The registration person says “look, the lock on your door is apparently broken, because the key only works ’sometimes’….i don’t really know what means since i’ve never heard of it happening before, but the security team says they think it will be about thirty minutes to an hour. if you could come back here then, we’ll either have your room ready or i’ll have more information”.

These are cardinal rules. Never forget who your real customer is–not the person you report to, not internal customers, not shareholder, not Wall Street…but your customers, the ones who buy your products. And then, allow your employees to set expectations properly. This is so huge, and yet seemingly difficult to maintain. It’s most often absent in strong Command-and-Control environments where interactions are scripted, and thinking is discouraged.

I point one more time to Southwest Airlines, as they take full advantage of the many channels available to them to communicate with their customers–both at the gate and online. Their blog is one of the better corporate blogs and has a strong following. They pass ideas through it and get feedback from their constituency. Sometimes the customer gets what he/she wants, sometimes not, but they always feel listened to and communicated with.