Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Check out this article (Put Buyers First? What a Concept) in the New York Times about how Amazon`s focus on customer service has had short term costs and long term benefits. The title says it all! Key quote:

Maybe, just maybe, taking care of customers is something worth doing when you are trying to create a lasting company. Maybe, in fact, it’s the best way to build a real business — even if it comes at the expense of short-term results.

Note:I have no financial interest in Amazon, although I am a customer.



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Love to hear about positive customer experiences! Thank you.

We`re starting to find an interesting trend, which is partly getting highlighted by the ongoing discussions about customer service, here on SuN.

I think I`m ready to propose that if a company has poor customer service, that company also has a disorganized, poor internal structure. Employees within the company will have the same sense of disgruntled resentment that customers have.

To that end, not only does poor customer service have an impact on the sales and profits, it also (I`ll suggest) indicates a half-life measure for the life of the company overall. In other words, poor customer service indicates the company will go out of business not only because of their interaction with customers, but also due to failed processes, along with high employee turnover (not to mention poor financial tracking).

Think about any company that`s gone out of business recently. Do you hear that the primary cause was bad customer service? (Well, okay...United Airlines maybe.) More often than not, it`s some financial issue. But then think about your own experience with that company. Wasn`t there *also* this customer service and lack of stock issue?

How come there aren`t more articles that link customer service to internal business processes and measure the related impact on the business health?!

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Ric Willmot
Executive Wisdom Consulting Group
www.ExecutiveWisdom.com
info@executivewisdom.com
Blog: www.ricwillmot.com

Founder of the Society for Executive Wisdom
www.ExecutiveWisdomSociety.com

Strategy for Professionals: www.strategyforprofessionals.com

There is a site I read all the time called Trust Matters, which talks about this kind of thing all the time. It`s a great site - I`d highly recommend it if you are in the business of building long-term relationships with your clients.

A number of people have written about the belief that quantity is the same as quality, popularity is the same as quality, and that consensus opinion is the same thing as objective truth.

Ken Wilber has a nice turn of phrase, speaking about "mythological thinking." In a nutshell, it means taking a structure of conceptual reasoning and folding it into a sort of "thing" or "being"---an entity. We then operate on that entity (mentally) as if it were a separate, living thing.

For example, going back to long-ago cultures, people believed that the weather was controlled by a god, as was the ocean, the air and wind, and such things as love, war, and so forth. It was a process of objectifying experience, then turning it into an attribute of some sort of god or goddess.

We look back on that system of thought and label it "myth." As kids, we study the Greek or Viking myths, learning about Thor, Zeus, Aphrodite, and so forth.

Nowadays, we have Global Warming, Cell Phone Danger, Secondhand Smoke, Healthcare for Everyone, Gun Control, and so on and so forth---all mythological beings.

The problem with this type of thinking is that it never examines reality or truth. It has no scientific reality-checking, mostly because it removes reality from consideration. "Customer" and "Business" have become mythological beings, subject only to the most general beliefs and wishes.