I love this posting over on Mark Hurst’s Good Experience:
Paul English, co-founder of Kayak, in an Inc. magazine profile:
If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.Other tips I liked: get an especially annoying ring on the customer service phone; send out a random customer service email to the company and investors; measure revenue per employee; don’t read business books.
The point of the comment is not about engineers or about customer service lines per se – and it is applicable into the many worlds that are closer to my own experience such as food service restaurants and packaged goods.
The point is that the “home office” or “managment office” has to stay aligned with what is actually happening at retail. If that means engineers learning problems they can fix with code, great. But it also means that your tracking systems in the finance department have to acknowledge how the transactions actually occur – which menas getting a full dose of reality of actual in-store or online experiences. If you are a product formulator, whether into a bottle or on top of a pizza, it is watching and interacting with customers actually using/eating the product.
Too often I have found that companies focus on what they think they know – or what they knew from their “time in the field at some point a really long time ago”.
Get out, all of you home office types. Live and breath your product or service as it is being delivered and ultimately used. Your product will improve, your customer service will improve, and your repeat will increase because of it.
Reality is a great space to visit – often.
