Just read a very exciting post here on Forbes by Steve Denning. Most of the post is the transcript of a talk Denning gave recently at TEDxOslo. His topic - 'the single best idea in management.' I started reading with some skepticism, but as I got into the heart of his argument, I found I agreed completely.
Denning's point is deceptively simple:
In today's world, focusing on delighting your customer is the only reliable approach to sustained profit and growth.
Before you slide past this (Sure, yeah, of course - delighting the customer) stop for a moment and think about what this means. It doesn't mean simply saying "our customers are important" at staff meetings, or training your front line people to deal nicely with customers. It means re-organizing your entire business around the goal of giving your customers what they want, when they want it, how they want it.
Denning uses Apple as his primary example, beginning when Steve Jobs returned to run the company in 1997, and spent the next 15 years making it a powerfully focused provider of 'things to delight the customer' (while profoundly altering music and cell phones, and almost single-handedly creating the tablet business).
Though Denning only mentions Amazon once in his article/speech (in the context of the Kindle being 'one of the things that works perfectly' for him), I think Amazon is an even better example of this principle of organizing your business to delight the customer. Last month, I had the good fortune to hear Anthony Bay, head of Amazon's video division, speak about just that. He was guest presenter at a yearly meeting I was facilitating (for AMC Networks - whose CEO, Josh Sapan, is a very forward-thinking guy, and makes it his business to learn from anyone who's doing well), and I learned a tremendous amount from Anthony about what it means to have a company focused first and foremost on satisfying customers.
Based on Denning's speech, Bay's remarks, and things I've observed over the past few years from clients of ours who are making this shift in mindset, here's what I see as the key changes that most businesses need to make in order to truly focus on delighting the customer:
1) Use "will the customer love it?" as your primary screen for action. Anthony Bay noted that whenever the Amazon team is deciding whether to make an important business decision - whether to invest in a new area, whether to add a new product, whether to re-structure - they always ask first whether it will work better for the customer. If not, they don't do it. Period. As he spoke about it, I could tell that it's baked in to their decision-making process, from Jeff Bezos on down. If you make this the first screen for all of your decisions, then the subsequent screens (Can we make a profit on this? Do we have or can we acquire the needed expertise? etc.) will be made in the proper context.
2) Work backwards from the customer. I loved a point Denning made in his speech about how 'stuff works' for him. He says, "As I look around my life, I see two kinds of stuff. There is stuff that works perfectly for me and there’s stuff that doesn’t. In the category of stuff that works perfectly for me, there is my Nespresso coffee maker, my Amazon Kindle, my Olympus audio recorder, my iPod, and my iPhone." Companies like Amazon and Apple seem to start from an envisioned end-state of 'stuff working perfectly for the customer' and then figure out how to get there. What that means, for instance, is that the focus in creating products becomes reliability and ease for the customer; the focus in creating delivery systems becomes reliability and ease for the customer; the focus in establishing processes and policies becomes - you guessed it - reliability and ease for the customer. Think about how much unnecessary, bureaucratic, internally focused people, systems and processes this approach could eliminate in most companies.
3) Support your great customers vs. policing the bad ones. I bought a Kindle as soon as they came out, in 2007. I loved it immediately. About two weeks after I bought it, it slipped out of my hands and crashed onto the hardwood floor in my apartment, effectively scrambling its little electronic brain. I called customer service hoping I wouldn't have to pay full price to get it replaced (it had cost me $399 -- and it was definitely my fault that it broke). I told the guy my story, and he said, "We'll send you a new one today. When you get it, just put the broken one into the new one's box and send it back to us." Stunned and happy, I complied. I had my new Kindle two days later, and sent them back my old one: no charge (not even shipping), no hassle. His only concern seemed to be that I get my new Kindle as quickly as possible. No third degree about what happened to the old one, no quibbles about warranty, no questioning of my honesty or intent.
I'm sure there are a few customers who will take unfair advantage of such liberal and customer-supportive policies (there always are), but that's a small price to pay for the thousands upon thousands of honest, well-intentioned customer who will be pleased and surprised, and who - like me - will consider themselves lifetime customers as a result of being treated this way.
This idea is definitely causing me to reflect on my own company, to think about whether our focus is as firmly centered on delighting the customer as it needs to be. What about you?
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Erika’s new book, Leading So People Will Follow, is now available online and in bookstores everywhere. It was selected by Amazon as one of the 10 Best Business Books for October, and as one of this month’s Jack Covert Selects.
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