Who are the customers we serve? What can we do to give our customers a better experience? What are our customer’s requirements? Think about these questions a minute.
Now that you have thought about those questions for a while who do you think your customers are? If you are like a lot of people you might not know who your real customers are. I think many of us serve ourselves and never really care about our true customers. I think we get too busy in our jobs, and personal lives, to take the time to determine who our real customers are. I am convinced that a large part of becoming a leader is finding out who your customers are and determining their requirements.
Here is a real-world example that I have recently dealt with that will hopefully help us all understand our true customers:
I am currently enrolled in an MBA program and have had to apply for a student loan in order to pay for my classes. The loan application process was very easy and I was pleasantly surprised. The government has done a very good job at determining who their customers are and has made the whole process fairly effortless. Everything is completed online and it happens very quickly. Once students are approved for their loans the money becomes available and when classes start the institution takes it out to pay for tuition and gives the rest of the money to students for living expenses and books. Can you pick out all of the supplier/customer relationships in this scenario? The government clearly has at least two customers which are the students and the organizations of higher learning. I think it easy to see that the school’s accounting personnel have two customers also. They have the students who are anxiously awaiting their money so they can buy books and they have the school which needs the tuition to pay its bills. It is very important for the leaders in this example to know who their customers are and if they are satisfied. It is also very important for leaders to know which customer to satisfy first if you are experiencing periods of limited resources.
Please consider what the school is actually doing. The money is sitting out in a reserve somewhere waiting for the classes to start. Once the first day of class comes the school goes into that reserve and pulls out enough money to cover the student’s tuition. At some point in time (2-5 weeks) the school gets around to distributing what is owed to the students. Can anyone besides me see a problem here? Can you see where the school might have lost track of who the most important customer is? Other indicators that the school does not know their real customer lies in the customer service activities. The accounting personnel, if they even answer the phone, answer your questions in a condescending tone. You get a different answer depending on who you talk to. They have really lost touch with who their customers are.
I think as leaders we must be very aware of who our customers are and constantly strive to meet their needs. When we find a customer that is not satisfied with our performance we have to put any resources we can on making them happy because after all they are the reason we exist. As we develop the leader that is inside each of us my hope is we do it with the customer in mind.
May God Bless You!
