QUOTATION 76

CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN ON HOW CUSTOMERS CONTROL YOUR ORGANISATION

Use this to remind you and your staff that happy customers are your greatest asset.

Clayton M. Christensen (b. 1952) is an American academic, educator, author and business consultant. His management interests are wide-ranging but he captured just how important customers are to an organisation when he said:

It is a company’s customers who effectively control what it can and can’t do.

Clayton M. Christensen

At the start of this section on how to build and maintain customer relations, it’s worth emphasising that you are not doing your customers a favour by providing them with a great service. It is actually they who hold the power in this relationship.

WHAT TO DO

  • In large organisations there is a danger that too many people become remote from customers. It would be useful if every organisation followed the advice of Robert Townsend and required all staff to spend two weeks working on the front line dealing with customers when first appointed and every three or four years thereafter.
  • Commit your organisation to placing customers at the centre of all you do. Make their satisfaction your focus. Now some of you may say: I don’t have anything to do with customers, I work in IT or R&D. Well, you do have customers. The people within the organisation who receive your reports or services are your customers and you should treat them as such. If you provide a poor service, word will quickly spread and you’ll find yourself under pressure to improve or leave.
  • Train all staff, including senior staff, in the organisation’s customer care policy and procedures. If senior staff attend the same training sessions as middle and junior staff, it will send out a more powerful message about the importance of customer care than any number of emails and pronouncements they make from on high.
  • Aim to ensure that anyone in the organisation who receives a complaint is able to deal with it and not just ‘transfer the call’ to customer services and wash their hands of it.
  • As part of the training, explain how the customers’ actions effectively control what the organisation is able to do. Too often staff forget the simple truth that it is customers who pay their wages and provide the profits for investment in new machinery, systems and research.
  • Don’t allow staff to talk disparagingly of customers. Yes, there is always the funny story that can and should be shared, but denigration of customers by staff should not be tolerated. It’s a sign of contempt and, if widespread, becomes part of the organisation’s culture and accepted practice. Such entrenched attitudes are then difficult to eradicate.
  • Choose from the quotations in this section those ideas that you find useful and incorporate them into your own customer procedures.

QUESTIONS TO ASK

  • How much attention do I give to issues of customer care?
  • Do I think that customer care is boring and switch off as soon as anyone mentions customer care, thinking that it doesn’t affect me?
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