Counting Your Blessings: A Story of Takeout and Customer Obsession

Customer obsession: making customers feel valued and cared for.

It's amazing how seemingly innocuous events can contain important lessons for work, life and effectiveness. If one just keeps their eyes open, with a mind and heart to observe and learn, indelible experiences that imprint themselves on the memory lead to paradigm shifts that drive the "upward spiral of growth and change", as Stephen R. Covey so eloquently puts it in his seminal work "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People."

"Customer obsession", "customer satisfaction", "customer driven" and similar terms in work and business are used to depict and emphasize the orientation of a service provider, highlighting the singular importance and relational value of the person who uses the service and finds it of value. "Customer obsession" in particular is a term most often associated with Amazon, best known for having made it the cornerstone of their entire business model and leveraged it with incredible effectiveness.

Thus, in work and business, we are told, your customer experience is everything; the single most important factor that differentiates between success and failure. I myself learned to appreciate the utter centrality of this maxim to achieving a successful business model in one of my former roles of my career to date. I was working as a Solutions Architect, providing customers and sales teams with pre-sales engineering support in the Industrial Automation domain.   
It was thus in a completely unrelated setting that while on a short break to visit my family over Christmas, I happened to pick up lunch at a catering and takeout-only shop - Zauq, at their location in Milton, Ontario [1]. It was a business specializing in Indian-Pakistani cuisine, and my first time there. A simple setup, but with good food, tasteful decor and aesthetics.

But more than anything else, it was the personal sign of appreciation set up by the owner made an indelible impression of his effort to add value value for his patrons. Suddenly, it ceased to be just another takeout place in a little strip mall, and took on the nature of a warm, personal connection that stood out long after the food had been packed, taken home and consumed.  

It was a simple reminder that we do business with people, not inanimate objects; we serve human beings, not "assets" or "resources". That paradigm of "who" makes all the difference in the "what we do" and the "why". People remember experiences with others. But on another note, customers are not just external; they are internal as well. Stephen R. Covey makes note of this point, and offers an valuable nugget of wisdom from "7 Habits" regarding the way we see and treat customers, both internal and external, within the context of the Production/Production Capability principle [2]:

"The P/PC Balance is particularly important as it applies to the human assets of an organization - the customers and employees...There are organizations that talk a lot about the customer and then completely neglect the people that deal with the customer - the employees. The PC principle is to always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers. You can buy a person's hand, but you cant buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness. PC work is treating employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as volunteers, because that's what they are. They volunteer the best part - their hearts and minds.

I was in a group once where someone asked, "How do you shape up lazy and incompetent employees? One man responded, "Drop hand grenades!" Several others cheered that kind of macho management talk, that "shape up or ship out" supervision approach.

But another person in the group asked, "Who picks up the pieces?" 

"No pieces."

"Well, why don't you do that to your customers?", the other man replied. Just say Listen, if you're not interested in buying, you can just ship out of this place.'"

He said, "You can't do that to customers."

"Well, how come you can do it to employees?"

"Because they're in your employ."

"I see. Are your employees devoted to you? Do they work hard? How's the turnover?"

"Are you kidding? You can't find good people these days. There's too much turnover, absenteeism, moonlighting. People just don't care anymore."" 

If we wouldn't treat our customers (on whom we depend for survival) the same way we treat our team or employees, we've got a serious problem. Inasmuch as Pirelli's famous slogan states that "power is nothing without control", competency is not enough. Character counts as well. And the end result of investing or sowing in that Production Capability of valuing our internal customers will be that we can indeed count our blessings of the fruit of success and effectiveness in our endeavours.

REFERENCES:

[1] Zauq Catering & Takeout

[2] The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey, 25th Anniversary Edition