A Word in Support of
Suppliers
By Peter Block
I want to bring some
balance into our obsession with costumer service. When an idea becomes
popular, at some point common sense disappears and mindless ideology
takes over. This is what happened with our concern for the customer.
We have entered a period of customer
entitlement which does neither the customer nor the supplier any good.
First of all, the customer is not always
right. What the customer asks for is often questionable. Frequently the
customer does not know what they need, what will really help them, and
if we give them exactly what they ask for, we will have let them down.
Some examples in the realm of organizational learning:
- Managers ask for training when it
won't help. Requesting training is often a defense against confronting
deeper problems resting in the hands of the manager. Many
organizational problems are about the abuse of power, inauthentic
communications, or the fact that individuals have not committed to the
well-being of the whole unit. These are not solved by training,
they are questions of will and choice. Conducting a training session
simply because it is requested is a form of collusion.
- When training does not make sense,
customers want it delivered sooner, shorter and antiseptically.
Can you condense a three day program to one day? Can we run it in the
evening? Can we structure ever minute so that difficult political and
emotional problems don't "get in the way"? Can we put the program on a
computer or video so that participants can take it when they want it?
At some point, the answer to the customer is NO. The kind of social
and structural change most organizations are attempting can not be
delivered just-in-time, off the shelf, or via computer or satellite.
Human problems get solved by human means.
Management problems that matter will not get solved by speed or
technology. If we promise something faster and simpler, we are
postponing lasting solutions which, although done in the name of
service, is in fact a disservice. In these examples about training, a
compulsive desire to serve the customer becomes self-defeating.
Suppliers have an obligation to teach customers how and when to use
their service/product, and in the extreme, to say no to a request.
In making the customer a god, we are
creating an era of customer entitlement. In an effort to win over
customers, we are supporting unfulfillable expectations. We reinforce
the wider culture's wish for instant gratification and a desire to 'live
better through chemistry.' Living better through chemistry is the wish
to take a pill to solve a problem. Someone recently said that we have
reached the point where we consider depression to be Prozac deficiency.
The wish for a pill is the wish for an instant solution in which nothing
more is required of me than to swallow. The demand for low cost, quick,
painless solutions to management problems is the workplace version of
seeking the perfect drug.
Many customer demands signify a
reluctance to both take responsibility for their role in solving their
own problems, and to face up to the fact that a customer-supplier
relationship is a partnership. Something is required of the customer if
the service or product we provide is going to have ultimate value to the
customer.
What is needed is the concept of customer
civility. Being a customer is a choice, not a right. Customer
service is not a weapon to be used to satisfy our demands. If an
airplane is late or overbooked, there is no justification to verbally
abuse an airline gate agent. If a speaker at a conference talks too long
or is off the mark, we have an obligation to speak up and set the
conversation back on course. It is not enough to stalk out of the
session and nail the speaker on the evaluation form.
This is not to say that most
organizations have solved the customer service problem. They haven't.
Many are not even close to treating customers, have gone overboard on
our demands. Something more is required of a customer than to simply pay
for a service or product. We have to recognize that many of the
solutions we seek require active participation and some patience on our
part. Customer civility is the willingness to listen and learn and focus
on what we need to do to contribute to the solution we seek.
This
article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in June 1997
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