"Customer and process, will they ever get married?" is actually an old headline borrowed from…me! A few years back, I was asked to address a group of key managers from different organisations. I was given a free hand deciding on the topic. At the time, and still till today, I have been so concerned about companies' internal processes and how much they serve the customers. I have always been fascinated by the fact that processes are not serving the customer, even though they were created with that sole purpose in mind. That is how that topic came to light. Why now? Two significant events led to that same route again: 1) Very recently, I had a business meeting with two former colleagues from my Xerox days. Farid Moharram, now managing director for Sadco, and Samir Younis, partner for Top Business. The meeting was, expectedly, a mix of the business purpose we met for, as well as some business anecdotes and reminiscing our past as great Xeroids. Farid brought up the example of using an old standard to recognise "excellent" field engineers for their "excellent" response time. (Response time is how long customers have to wait between calling for service and an engineer showing up). Being a customer-orientated company, Xerox used to evaluate engineers' performance based on factors including response time. Except they used an "average" response time. Here is an example of how wrong that standard was: If an engineer's average response time is six hours, he was rewarded. You also tell your customers that your response time is six hours. A customer calling at 9am will expect service on the same day. Right? Nooooo! Any statistician will tell you that an average will also mean that there is a minimum and maximum. While some customers get a service in six hours, other "lucky" customers will get one hour, and other will get the next day. Those are the screaming ones that keep yelling at us, while our engineers are laughing all the way to the bank! They cash fat checks for high level of customer satisfaction. 2) Another incident that got me thinking about the total disconnection between company processes and customer satisfaction also took place this week. I visited my car company for regular service. I noticed that they have many processes to ensure quality level of jobs performed…from their viewpoints, not necessarily their customers. After paying a large amount of money, as we all do we go to the so-called authorised dealer, I had to ask the questions. It was simple, "why do I always check my car in, 20 minutes after the time allocated for me?", "why do I do equal waiting time to service time?" (This means I spend four hours for a two-hour job), and while we're at it "why do you hang a sign saying your break is 15 minutes, and everyone in the workshop says it's 30 minutes?" A decent engineer gave me a nice long presentation about their internal processes, and finished off by telling me that if an auditor was there "he would have given a rate of excellent". I heard myself finishing off his sentence "….but not your customer". Final words: A Stew Leonard sign at the entrance of his supermarket reads: Rule #1: The customer is always right Rule #2: If the customer is ever wrong, reread rule #1.
