The Customer What Customer Syndrome Part II
Last week you were introduced to a dangerous trend in the marketplace, which I've named the, "Customer? What Customer? Syndrome," or CWCS. This condition is found in companies that are more concerned with competitors than with customers.
You learned that Level One CWCS infects employees who have received little or no training about the direct link between customers and their employer's success -- or even their paychecks. Level One is dangerous but not hopeless, because those so afflicted can be cured with training.
Now let's talk about Level Two CWCS, which only afflicts managers. Level Two is more troubling and organizationally more devastating because it occurs at the top, where strategic decisions are made.
The incidence of Level Two CWCS is not associated with company size or structure; it afflicts owners of small businesses as well as managers of multi-national conglomerates.
Like Level One, the cause of Level Two is simple, but it is different. Level Two is caused by a change in proximity.
As a business grows it's a natural law that executives become more involved in the macro operating issues, which almost by definition puts them in closer proximity to competitors than to customers. When competitors become more top-of-mind and customers are more out-of-sight out-of-mind, Level Two CWCS occurs, and it looks like this:
Decisions are made that favor strategies focused more on manipulating customers away from competitors, than those that create a unique customer experience, including training employees how to deliver that experience.
Executives with CWCS see their job as a game where increased marketshare means they've beaten a competitor, instead of executing best practices that create customer loyalty by adding value to their customers' experience.
A company infected with CWCS uses its size or market presence to try to intimidate customers to do business with them, instead of developing strategies that create the long-term benefit of having customers you can't run off.
It?s actually possible for an entire industry to contract CWCS. It happens when companies have obsessed about each other so much that, in time, it becomes difficult to tell them apart. Such a scenario is fertile soil for entrepreneurs. Witness the airline industry.
How do you inoculate for CWCS? With the, "There's My Customer!" vaccine, or TMC.
The TMC formula is simple, inoculation is fun, and the ROI is enormous: Spend more time asking what customers want than what competitors are doing. Then develop and execute a business model that focuses on delivering what your customers tell you.
Cured of CWCS, you'll contract the healthy condition of repeat business from loyal customers you can't run off.
Write this on a rock... CWCS in a big business is inefficient and ugly; in a small business, it's terminal.
Jim Blasingame
Small Business Expert and host of The Small Business Advocate Show
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