Can you radically change your employee’s perspective on customer service with one word?

“The customer is always right.” has become a clichéd and throw-away statement, to the point that it no longer has any value.

But change ‘the’ with ‘our’, the statement suddenly becomes a powerful way to connect your brand to your customer.

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. - ca. 15th century, see note*

This saying is ancient, yet so often ignored. Most companies, especially those striving for growth, want ANY customers, regardless of whether they will be profitable customers. If a business tries to please everyone, limited resources will get spread so thin that failure is inevitable. This is a big reason why ‘the’ must be replaced with ‘our’.

First, a couple of examples where companies decided who their customers were, and who they were not:

1) Rackspace Matched Fanatical Support with Average Technology: Rackspace made a very conscious decision that they wanted to focus on being the best at customer support. This means making everybody happy right? Wrong.

They decided that if they targeted the entire hosting services customer base, they would end up with customers that would constantly push them to roll out bleeding-edge technologies that were not yet stable, tried and true. The latest technology needs more resources to support. This is why BMW tests out new technologies an features on their highest-end (and lowest volume) cars. By focusing on attracting customers that want great customer service, over the latest technology, Rackspace able to focus resources and deliver on the ‘our customer is always right’ adage.

2) Sprint Fires 1000 Customers: Sprint can hardly be identified as synonymous with success, a quick look at their stock price seems to indicate that they are still headed for the dustbin of history, but they did do something that fits the ‘our’ vs. ‘the’ paradigm. They decided they were NOT about customer support, and decided to ‘fire’ their most whiny customers.

Their service department discovered an 80/20 rule, where a small fraction of customers were creating the vast majority of their support calls. So instead of trying to please these demanding (and unprofitable) customers, Sprint decided to fire them. Good for business? Not sure. But I am sure the next employee survey will see a big spike in satisfaction for Sprint’s call centre workers!

Here are some other ‘tradeoffs’ you may have experienced (note that many tradeoffs translate to better margins for the seller):

• Nordstrom customers are willing to look the other way on price to have a stellar shopping experience
• Costco customers are willing to trade off stylish product displays and reasonable portions for a great price
• LuluLemon customers were willing to pay high prices for workout wear, so they could look fashionable even at the gym
• Chrysler recognized that there were people who needed reasonably priced vehicles with more room, but didn’t care much about how the vehicle drove, and the mini-van was born
• Apple recognized customers that could use a computer, MP3 player, smart phone and tablet, that cared a lot more about simplicity & style than the underlying technology, which begat the iPod, iPhone, iPad and original Macintosh
• Marks Work Wearhouse knows their customers are willing to overlook cachet clothing labels to shop for reasonably priced, utilitarian work wear that is easy to maintain
• Harley Davidson riders trade reliability and modern technology to be part of a culture that says something about who they are.

So who are your customers, and what are they willing to trade off?

Are they like Rackspace customers, willing to trade off bleeding edge technology for the ability to talk to a real person when they have problems? Or are they more like Sprint customers, looking for a cheap solution where they will hopefully never have to call customer support?

Ideas to definine (y)our customer, the tradeoffs they are willing to make, or what they will pay extra for:

One approach is to capture all of the attributes that your client base values in the products/services that you and your competition could offer. Based on the demographic you desire, which items would they put at the top of the list, and at the bottom? Once these are ranked, laminate the sheet and make sure your entire team has it: marketing, sales, operations, customer support… everyone (test it of course).

Another  approach has used successfully by several organizations including the ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ campaign and The Saddleback Church, is to personify your target customers. Saddleback helped their employees understand their customer by creating a detailed -yet fictitious– model customer named ‘Saddleback Sam’. It’s human nature to be able to more easily identify with an individual than some abstract group. By turning their target demographic into a person they could relate to, Saddleback enabled each of their employees to make independent decisions that would be more likely to be consistent wit their target audience, and more likely to connect with their customers.

Once you define who the customer is, ‘Our Customer Is Always Right’ starts to mean something.

*Note: I always try my best to give credit where credit is due, but this quote is very elusive, even though most of us have heard it. It is often attributed as a variant of ‘can’t fool all of the people all of the time…’ which *may* be attributed to Lincoln (even that is debated). Other sources attribute this to an adaptation of a John Lydgate quote by Lincoln. Since my grasp of middle english is tenuous at best, I can’t understand Lydgate’s work well enough to find a quote even close. Since it is clear that all people that I could attribute this to are long dead, and unlikely to take offense, I decided to move on after a long and fruitless goose-chase.