Is the organization the enemy of the customer?
What is good for the organization and what is good for the customer are not always the same thing.
Organizations are used to saying to customers: “Here’s what we have. If you like it, you’re going to have to adapt to how we do business.” But on the Web, the customer has much more control. The customer is saying to the organization: “Here’s what I want. If you have it, great, but adapt to me.”
The organization needs the customer. The customer needs the organization. So, shouldn’t that lead to a perfect marriage? No.
What’s at play is complexity and change. Most people and most organizations are inherently conservative. We resist complexity and change.
This world is a swirl of ever-increasing complexity and change. So, the questions become: Who changes? Who takes on the complexity?
I was with an organization recently that will not accept email enquiries from the public. It is a long-established organization and it simply has not been able (or willing) to initiate the internal changes required to allow email enquires.
It can deal with customers coming into its offices. It can deal with customers ringing up. It can deal with customers sending in letters. But it can’t (won’t) deal with its customers sending in emails.
It is cheaper and often more efficient to deal with an enquiry or support question by email (not to mention by online chat). So why doesn’t the organization do this? Because this is a large organization and changing to a situation where email enquiries can be received will cause it a lot of hassle and complexity.
Intranets are notorious places for organizational complexity, departmental chest-thumping, and vanity publishing. Without proper management, they become a peacock’s paradise and an acronym and jargon jamboree. It would seem that internally, the department and the division is the enemy of the organization.
It’s a complex world. And there is a choice. Will the organization take on this complexity so as to make things simpler for the customer? Or will the customer take on the complexity thus making life easier for the organization?
In a rigid authoritarian society, customers and citizens have no choice. They have to fill out long forms, stand in line, adhere to archaic rules, and bow to inflexible bureaucracy.
But in a modern and open society, the shoe of complexity is on the other foot. It is the organization that must bend and be flexible. It is the organization that must wear out leather as it rushes around trying to simplify the world for the customer.
This need for flexibility is equally necessary within the organization. Staff are no longer thankful for jobs for life, because there are no jobs for life. They are no longer as willing to learn and adapt to badly designed internal processes.
The old organization must give way to a new, much more flexible model. The organization can no longer easily say: adapt to us.
Organization is not an end in itself. The end is to achieve an objective. What is the objective? Serve the customer. In a complex world, serving means making simple.
John Heaton says:
Added on February 3rd, 2008 at 8:57 pmHi Gerry
Always an interesting read.
I am not convinced the users are say “adapt to me”. So many very successful retail sites demand your details before they let you enter. And users comply, freely spreading their personal deatils throughout the net. They wouldn’t if their local bricks and mortar store asked.
I some ways I am with the company that refuses to deal in email. Most companies these days do allow email queries and most screw it up. If you call you usually get near instant response to your query. If you email you get an automated response (I hate these as much as I hate the automated voice response when you call a company) and if you are fortunate you get a response within the promised time. Generally you don’t. And generally you get a bored person who is dealing with a real customer but a representation of the customer so they feel no ownership of the relationship (however transient) and so you frequently get an unsatisfactory response leading to an elongated and very frustrating email conversation.
This can lead to loss of business. I no longer deal with Symantic, for example.
Some companies now only offer email as a contact method. I try not to deal with them
Tony Friendly says:
Added on February 3rd, 2008 at 9:46 pmmaybe you should send this article to Washington DC.
It is important that companies I deal with respond by email and quickly. I do with my customers.
Roman says:
Added on February 4th, 2008 at 11:04 amGerry,
It is the third post I read from you, and I can’t wait to read it!!!
You write exactly what I feel, think… great.
The good news in this post, is that there is a lot of space, to new company, that want to compete, with “old” company.
We try to answer everything within an hour, even though the list of clients, does not stop to get bigger. Clients are thankful for that!
Gerry, do not stop to write! Roman
Sue Henry says:
Added on February 4th, 2008 at 2:52 pmWe work to ensure all aspects on our external websites are customer-focused. We will be redoing our site in the near future with this as the driving focus.
However on our internal sites we do follow the organization structure. And yes there are a several of vanity projects :(. But following this structure is what our customers or staff expect and are familiar with. I don’t think this is wrong. Should we reconsider this?
Jen from Canada says:
Added on February 4th, 2008 at 6:06 pmI think that the customers are starting to demand the long tail. We have for so long, told customers that they are always right. We have told our children that they are unique and special. Meanwhile, organizations have never invested the time or energy to structure the organizations so that it is customer-centric. Rather, organizations have used words to spin how they meet customers needs. Organizations have over-promised and under-delivered to the customers. And on the Internet, the customers got smarter. The customers got more information. The customers found power. Because the Internet is the democratizer. It shares information and does not discriminate between users. The Internet does not care whether it is the CEO or if it is the administrative assistant asking for this information. I think it is important to really ask when you are redesigning your website whether it is customer focused or not, but is the structure of your organization there to support the customer. Because organizations can use the right words and Information Architecture to structure a website to be more customer-centric, but it does not end there…it is the holistic view…is the company structured to be customer-centric? Do you have someone at your organization that advocates for the customer? Are the rewards in place at your organization to recognize those who are customer-centric?
Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:
Added on February 4th, 2008 at 7:58 pmJohn, that’s a good point about email, and I hadn’t really thought about it that way. Certainly, it is much better to have no email if you can’t manage a professional response.
Sue, we’ve done a lot of work with intranets, and we’ve found that most staff don’t understand the org structure. They may understand it for their department, but after that the get really confused. Great intranets tend to have a task-based, rather than organization-based, architecture.
Jen, I think you’re right. Customers are just much more demanidng today. (Not always a good thing.) And you raise the right questions at the end of your post, particularly about how we reward those who are customer-centric.