45© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/ert.21410

Business-management guru Peter Drucker captured the importance of the role of

the customer in stating, “The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satis-fied customer.”1 In thinking about that state-ment, important questions emerge. Do you know whether your customers are satisfied, and do you know what it is like to be a cus-tomer in your business? Why do customers do business with your organization? What is it like to experience every aspect of what your organization does? Have you ever actu-ally called your own customer-service line? If you truly dive into what it is like to be a customer of your organization, you will be amazed. You may even be shocked. You will certainly have a better appreciation for what your people have to go through on a daily basis attempting to hold it all together.

MAXIMIZING YOUR EFFORTS

You may be doing customer-satisfaction sur-veys and even transactional surveys. Do you know whether these efforts have provided lasting and consistent changes? What free-dom do they unleash for the team? How do you become a better customer-serving organi-zation because of the feedback? How do you connect with your customers? How can you get team members to passionately con-nect with your customers as if their very existence depended on it? Leaders must show

their passion for the customer so that exuber-ance is shared by the entire team.

A more effective way of understanding your customer is to make sure that your employees are well trained to be customer-friendly. When you bring on new employees, how much time do you spend with your new recruits, ensuring that they completely under-stand the principles for serving a client with the purpose that you envision? Disney spends six weeks doing it. Lululemon Athletica does the same. So does the Four Seasons Hotel chain. These organizations understand that serving customers must be a passion shared with employees, and employees must under-stand that in the end, customers pay their salaries.

CONTRASTING EXAMPLES OF VALUING CUSTOMERS

Anytime I see or experience customer service that is not up to my expectations, I address it. I rationalize that the best gift an organiza-tion can receive is a complaint. It is a gift because the business has a chance to correct what a customer views as inferior service and make sure it never happens again. Not all businesses, though, view complaints as gifts. Most organizations view a complaint from a customer as a nuisance that is going to mean extra work or more paperwork. These are usually organizations where the systems, processes, policies, and procedures are designed for the comfort and convenience

What Is It Like Being Your Customer?

Robert S. Murray

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supposed five-star resort called “Dreams” in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

Contrast this scenario with an organization that has processes and systems designed to engage valued guests and provide them with comfort and convenience. Training goes into every employee to ensure that guests are a top priority, and the team is allowed to inter-vene with their brains to enable the organiza-tion to passionately serve.

My wife and I checked into the Four Seasons Hotel in Whistler, British Columbia, for a weekend of skiing. Everything went smoothly as expected at the check-in. Later on, when we were about to go out for the evening for dinner, I called the front desk to ask for directions to the restaurant we wanted to go to. The clerk gave me easy-to-follow directions but asked whether we would like the hotel to provide a ride for us to the restaurant. I told the clerk that we felt like walking but asked whether someone could pick us up afterward. He said, “Cer-tainly!” I then asked; “What if it is late?” He said, “No problem.” I asked further, “What if we are not at that restaurant?” He then quickly replied, “No problem. We will find you wherever you are.” All I could say was “Wow!”

HIRE FOR A MIND-SET OF SERVICE

We all have stories from both sides of the bal-ance sheet. What I find curious is that it does not take much work to hire for and further embed a mind-set of service. Organizations that start with the mind-set that they are “a people company that happens to serve coffee” (as is the case with Starbucks) have higher profits because they recruit, hire, and nurture people who are allowed to think and build emotional connections with their customers.

of the organization and were never designed with the customer in mind. These are also organizations that have low employee engage-ment or satisfaction and struggle to maintain consistent growth and profitability.

As an example, imagine you and your fam-ily have planned and saved for a dream vaca-tion in a tropical destination. You have talked about it for months and made numerous arrangements and preparations for your time away. As the day of your trip edges closer, you can feel the excitement building in every-one. Finally, the day arrives. Your travel time is long. When you finally arrive at the hotel check-in desk, exhausted but excited to begin your holiday, you eagerly present yourself and your family as expected guests.

The clerk behind the desk then welcomes you with the scripted greeting but with-out the passion you were expecting. You go through the process of registering, and then the clerk informs you that the rooms you requested are not adjoining and that your family will be separated by a couple of floors. The clerk lacks empathy and simply states that the hotel is full and there is nothing he can do to help because, after all, “It is not my fault.”

You feel all the air of excitement rush out of you, and in creeps frustration, disappoint-ment, and worry. You attempt to reason with the clerk for a solution. You may even point out that you specifically requested adjoining rooms when you booked over six months ago.

The clerk is unmoved and simply sees you and your family as one of the 500-plus guests he has to deal with that day. You are a num-ber. You were slotted into rooms by a system that was designed to allocate rooms not on the special requests of their guests, but on efficiency. This is exactly what happened to my family last year when we checked into a

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profitability and massive customer loyalty even when catastrophic events happen like 9/11.

Look at your own consumer behavior. Although you may be able to list 20 or 30 restaurants that you have been to in the last year, there is probably a list of only four or five that you go to on a regular basis. It is likely that the reason has to do with more than the menu, and that in some way you have emotionally connected with the people who are part of the business because they make you feel welcomed and appreciated.

Organizations like Disney, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, WestJet Airlines, the Four

Seasons Hotels and Resorts chain, and Lulule-mon Athletica are obsessed with the people they hire. They spend weeks training their newly hired staff on customer-facing philoso-phies, processes, and communications before any one of them is able to be with customers. But most important, they teach their teams how to connect emotionally with customers. When companies like these have a failure in process, they immediately and instinc-tively go into a recovery process that is from a place of understanding of the customer’s needs and mind-set.

As a leader, your focus must be on the customer, and you must ensure that your team values customers just as much as you do. When you or your team delivers less than your company promises, recover swiftly and surely. When a customer complains, view the complaint as the best gift you ever received and astonish the client with your sincere

Their people are happier because of the respect they feel from the company and the customers. It is truly a win-win-win, and these organizations are also the most success-ful in their class.

MBA schools don’t spend enough time, if any, on the whole concept of serving your customer. Nor do they spend enough time teaching students and soon-to-be business leaders the concept of connecting emotionally with customers. Business leaders are taught to think from the left side of their brains—data, information, key performance indica-tors, spreadsheets, analysis, etc. However, people across the globe make decisions from the right side of their brains.

With respect to employees, they make decisions about their salary and benefits from the left side of their brains; however, to truly engage the hearts and minds of team mem-bers, they are looking for emotional connec-tions with the organization they have chosen to be with. The culture of the company, the relationships they have, the energy they bring to the office, the ideas they generate, and the “ownership” they take on key projects are all emotional decisions.

Customers may talk about wanting a “good price,” but that is only where they cannot become emotionally connected with your company. When your organization focuses only on price, quality, and features (all left-brain thinking), you become solely a com-modity. Your team then is forced to deal with customers from a left-brain paradigm, and when issues come up that do not fit into the paradigm, no one can figure out what to do. It is no surprise that companies that behave this way are constant underperformers—often languishing in mediocrity, while organiza-tions that “get it,” like WestJet and South-west Airlines, enjoy quarter after quarter of

What I find curious is that it does not take much work to hire for and further embed a mind-set of service.

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recovery. Make changes in process and train-ing, so that the action that was complained about does not happen again.

VIEW YOUR BUSINESS FROM A CUSTOMER’S PERSPECTIVE

Know what it is like to be a customer in your business. Know what it is like to experience every aspect of what your organization does. Know what every customer experience is like at every touch point. If the results are good, then make sure that those experiences can be replicated.

Connecting emotionally with customers is only possible when an organization is first able to connect emotionally with employ-ees and partners. Your business does not stand a chance if you cannot build a team of emotionally engaged and vested people. As a “turn-around mercenary,” I have seen

Robert S. Murray is a keynote speaker, international executive-development consul-tant, and the author of the critically acclaimed book It’s Already Inside: Nurturing Your Innate Leadership for Business and Life Success (2012). He may be contacted at www.robert-murray.com.

companies where the CEO and resulting flock of executives following them treat their people like consumable tools and then won-der why their market shares, customer bases, and revenues are all trending negatively.

You need to develop a culture where employees feel valued and respected. It starts with recruiting, assessing, hiring, and onboarding. The entire process of developing a team member is the most critical to form-ing a culture that you deserve. And when your business truly gets the beginning pro-cess right, it cannot help but be an organiza-tion that is able to continue to develop a team impassioned about serving your customers.

NOTE

1. Drucker, P. F. (2003). Peter Drucker on the profession of management (N. Stone, Ed.). Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review; p. 173.