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| Change Your Perspective by Steve Vaught |
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"I'm telling you, he was relentless. He just wouldn't shut up!" My friend wasn't talking about a coworker, but his dog, Henry.
"He was sitting in the yard, barking at the tree. I went out, looked up in the tree and didn't see anything that would cause Henry to be 'barking his head off.' I chalked it up to a dog's imagination, told him to knock it off and went back inside. Henry never left his post and less than five minutes later he was at it again - barking loud enough to wake the dead."
"I headed outside again thinking how uncharacteristic this was for Henry - his gaze still fixed on the same part of the tree. This time, I got down on my hands and knees – at Henry’s level. Sure enough, there was a frightened, but still menacing, Siamese cat resting on an upper branch. I hadn’t been able to see it the first time. I had to get down to his level; change my perspective, before I could see what was so obvious to Henry.”
The same advice applies to your organization. Get a new perspective on what it’s like to do business with your company by looking at it through the eyes of your customer. What is it like to buy products/services from you? Sit though a sales presentation? Call in to your Customer Service department? Receive an invoice or accept a delivery from you?
Put yourself in their place – with their knowledge of your organization. They don’t know your inventory supply, the reason you implemented the return policy, why it will take you two weeks to resolve their problem, the challenges you’re having with your vendors – and they don’t care. Would you like to do business with your company?
We often walk clients through our Customer Experience Continuum. In explaining each level from Customer Hostile, to Customer Indifference, Customer Friendly, all the way to Customer Focused, most organizations find they’re a mixture of several different levels. Yes, even including Customer Hostile. It depends on the day, the customer, and even the department. The customer experience is uneven, at best.
While that scenario is not uncommon, it doesn’t have to stay that way. It can be changed. Use a combination of internal brainstorming and actually talking with existing customers. Sincerely ask them what it’s like to work with you – then listen. Ask follow up and clarifying questions to get specific ways you can improve your organization.
It is so easy to be sucked into the “whirlpool” of day-to-day activities of leading an organization – even to the point it’s impossible to see what is obvious to others. Take some advice from Henry, the dog, and change your point of view to discover ways to move your organization to Customer Focused.