Years ago I used to deliver training in the stores of a national chain here in Canada. Most of the material was focused on the customer: How to handle difficult customers, How to tell if a customer complaint is legitimate, How to create add-on sales and so on. As you can see, there was a tone of, “…the customer may be trying to fleece us, so be on guard…”. Quite normal in retail chains today, especially with thin margins and on-line sales.

Fortunately, the training always included a trip onto the floor to demonstrate or observe the concepts in action. Unfortunately, most of the department managers were more focused on ‘getting the shelves filled’ than making sure customers were looked after. This often resulted in hearing the phrase in the title, “If it weren’t for all these customers we could sure get a lot of work done around here!” So the words said one thing “Customers first”, but the actions didn’t always support it. Typically, when humans are faced with actions that conflict with the words they hear, they tend to believe what they see, not what they hear!

By really wanting to satisfy customer needs and expectations, we can often streamline our management systems. By working closely with and listening to customers (internal and external) we might discover our audience doesn’t really care about something that we thought was important. We might even be able to save time and money by eliminating a step or two or altering something we do. But we have to ask the customer.

If the customer is viewed as an annoyance, we will not have the chance to benefit from interacting with them!

Know Quality, Know Profit…No Quality, No Profit

To find out if your ISO life can be simpler…

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To see the video of this post and others, stop by the Simplify YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrt2Hgj-5AjHKEvyf2ssZ8g