COS

NEWS

It’s certainly naive of me, but I always wonder why companies don’t put customers more at the heart of their decisions, management, organizations, priorities… It would be so profitable for them.
In reality, experience shows us that there are quite a few reasons not to make the quest for lasting customer satisfaction a company’s top priority.

Below is a list of 7 reasons that my colleagues and I have identified.

1. “We don’t need it”. The effort required to transform is not worthwhile (this is the case for organizations with no competition or that offer must-have services or products). We can’t do without them, so the cost of customer orientation sometimes becomes too high.
2. “We have other priorities”. Some companies in difficulty are forced to focus on their survival before anything else. I personally experienced this when I was in charge of customer transformation at La Halle.
3. “Managers play it cool”. This happens time and again. Despite the identified need to transform, everyone prefers to play to their own priorities, to the detriment of the collective destiny. The system of valuing and “employability” of managers may be one explanation.
4. “We’ve always done it this way”. It’s so much more comfortable to reproduce than to invent a new way of acting, thinking, deciding, managing… So many managers still decide to stick with the company’s historic ways of doing things, so as not to step out of their comfort zone (and incidentally, put themselves at risk).
5. “We don’t know how to do it”. It may sound like nothing, but customer culture is a complex subject, and simply tracking customer NPS is not enough to get the job done. Sometimes, due to a lack of mastery of the subject, some companies – though willing – miss the point.
6. “We’d like to, but it takes two of us”. Some sectors (I’m thinking in particular of the construction industry) experience strained relations between service providers and customers. Some are convinced that others want to rip them off, and vice versa… So one of the obstacles to transformation is the feeling of letting down one’s guard against one’s “best enemy”.
7. “We don’t care. Yes, it still happens sometimes, and some executives and managers simply don’t think it’s such an important issue.