For years, we have heard business authors, professors and consultants preach about enhancing how we should conduct business – particularly in the area of providing the product or service to our customers. Sam Walton has written about this and I’ve read countless articles in Harvard Business Review (HBR) that espouse the value of thinking about the sales transaction in a deeper way.
Personally, I agreed with all of those principles and, especially for organizations that needed a different paradigm about doing business, this made perfect sense….at least until a recent conversation I had.
Let me tell you about an experience I had, which highlighted the potential shortcomings of treating your customer like a customer.
I had a meeting with a doctor (I’ll just refer to him as Bob) that I’ve known for many years and he shared a perspective that impacted my view of this “customer centric” perspective. Now if you are scratching your head that an MD could teach us something about being customer focused, then get behind me in the line for skeptics. Perhaps we’ll save the blog about how the healthcare industry should transform for another day/blog.
So during our conversation, Bob said “yeah, we’ve had consultants come through the hospital telling us that we need to treat our patients more like customers. We shouldn’t simply view them as a queue of work that will always be here or, even worse that we treat them in a manner that indicates how inconvenient it is that they are seeking our services at times that are not always convenient.”
Bob went on to say something that stuck with me. He said “I became a surgeon so I can heal people. So they can walk out the door in significantly better shape than when they arrived. For me, if I simply reduced this to a ‘customer relationship’ whereby they have a need, I have a service and they pay me for that services, it completely depersonalizes what we do here. In fact, that defeats why I became a doctor in the first place”.
I reflected on that a bit, especially in the context of some recent articles and books about servant leadership. Does this mean we now need to treat our customers like a patient? Or act like doctors?
So much of the time we get consumed with important metrics, that we don’t want to ignore, but this begs the question, how can we think about our organization beyond the typical revenue per customer, average spend, customer loyalty/retention and other measures. Hmmm, so much to ponder here.
Like you, over the years, I have seen a few trends and see a few more on the horizon and I would like to share a few takeaways:
- Hiring people whose mission and/or personal value system is aligned with that of the organization is the single best action leaders can take so that an organization’s culture and how it operates the majority of the time, is in turn with your most important stakeholders. I’m not an expert in recruiting and assessment best practices, but it would seem that the big challenge is how do we assess this alignment with the candidates we are considering? How do we truly know if a candidate is all talk and no walk?
- I would argue that no amount of training, empowerment, job enrichment or compensation will, with integrity, overtake a disconnect between an individual’s values and the culture an organization is striving to embrace over the long term.
- Those of us that are in the business of providing a service, have a lesson, if not an obligation, to consider. How aligned is our personal mission with that of the service we provide? Are we providing: consulting, financial planning, legal, educational, insurance, hospitality, health and wellness and other services merely for the money or are we truly in it to get our “customers” to a significantly better place?
- The same standard holds true to anyone providing a product – are you selling the product to meet quotas or is it truly the best solution for the customer’s need? How have you integrated the “voice and needs of the customer” into the continual evolution of the product?
- The patient/customer has an obligation here too. If this relationship truly has integrity, how ready is the patient to follow the treatment protocol? By the way, here is an excellent change readiness survey if you need to assess how ready your organization is to change.
In summary, organizations own the responsibility to create and cultivate an environment where the mission of the organization and the personal mission of its employees are aligned. Beyond that, enabling employees with the proper processes, policies, technology, analytics, training, reward mechanism and physical environment can only serve to keep an organization thriving. As you know, this takes time. It takes an intentional focus. The best time to start this was last year. Then second best time is now.
Transformation initiatives like this one is a good example of the types of challenges that TSI helps our clients with. Please reach out to us and let us know how we can assist you or your business.
Written by: Dan Feely, TSI’s President and Founder. For more information on TSI’s expert consultants, visit The TSI Team page.
