Chapter 2

Run Your Business for Your Customers
Become ETDBW

A few years ago, a consultant brought in a videotape to show the CEO of a medium-size manufacturer of scientific equipment. On the screen appeared the face of the president of the manufacturer’s largest customer, who leaned toward the camera and hissed through clenched teeth, "I hate you." A similar sentiment was recently expressed by a senior executive of one of their major customers to the leadership team of a large maker of telecommunications equipment: "If you gave us your products for free, we couldn’t afford to do business with you."

What was agitating these customers, and countless others in every industry, has nothing to do with products, features, quality, or price. Their suppliers’ products were up to date, well made, and reasonably priced. Instead, the customers’ enormous dissatisfaction had everything to do with the fact that doing business with these two companies was overwhelmingly complex, problematic, and fatiguing. These companies presented customers with product descriptions so obscure that customers had to struggle to determine which products they wanted to buy; their opaque ordering procedures required customers to spend enormous amounts of time specifying what they wanted; their error-prone delivery processes forced customers to check all shipments and return many of them; their billing systems produced invoices whose deciphering would tax the patience of Job; and the major role of their "customer service" units seemed to be to pass customers from one unhelpful representative to another. These companies were decidedly not ETDBW: not easy to do business with.

Easy to do business with means that from the customer’s standpoint, interacting with you is as inexpensive and effortless as possible. It means that you accept orders when and by whatever means it is most convenient for the customer to place them; it means the orders are worded in customer terminology rather than in your obscure nomenclature. It means you make it painless for a customer to check the status of an order; you eliminate that endless series of futile phone calls to uninterested and uninformed functionaries who have been trained only to refer the caller to someone else equally uninformed. It means you send a simple bill that is expressed in comprehensible terms, not your own recondite codes and internal references, and that is designed from the outset to be read and used by the customer; in other words, a bill that someone other than a cryptanalyst can decipher.

The importance of becoming ETDBW is captured by the principle that "product price is only part of customer cost." The payment that your customer sends you isn’t the entire cost the customer incurs in doing business with you. The customer must also interact with your sales representative, formulate an order, receive, check, and inventory the goods, receive and interpret your invoice, pay the bill, return the goods that aren’t in good shape, and so on. All of these activities cost the customer money, none of which ends up in your pocket. In some cases, the overhead costs of doing business with you rival what the customer actually pays you.

If your ordering procedure is opaque, then your customer has to waste time and money trying to translate it. If you provide no simple way for customers to check on orders, they have to beat their way through exasperating phone calls to canned voices that provide no information. If your delivery system is erratic and unreliable, your customer has to waste time and money developing ways to cope with your malfeasance. If the invoice you provide is hard to interpret, your customer has to spend time arguing about it with your billing people (who will soon run out of time and patience themselves).

If your ways of working are designed for your own convenience rather than for your customers’, they will pay the penalty, and in the long run, so will you. The harder it is to do business with you, the greater the burden and the costs you impose on your customer and, of course, the less competitive you become. Lowering your prices by cutting your margins is one way to distinguish yourself from your competitors, but a loathsome one. And for some companies, such as the telecommunications equipment maker mentioned earlier, even giving away their products isn’t enough to offset the annoyance of doing business with them. In the customer economy, ETDBW isn’t an option. It is a requisite for survival.

Is your business easy to do business with? I doubt it. Your company is much more likely to impose penalties on your customers for the privilege of doing business with you. The experiences of ordering, receiving, using, and paying for your products and services probably lead your customers to put your photograph on their dartboards. To the extent that your customers’ experiences are less than bad, that is most likely the result of what one company calls "random acts of kindness toward customers" rather than anything sustainable and repeatable. I’m not saying that you deliberately made your company hard to do business with; it just turned out that way. And you never did anything about it because you never thought it was an important issue.

Being HTDBW (see if you can figure it out) is an almost inevitable consequence of how most managers traditionally thought about the nature of their businesses. The traditional company was inwardly focused. It defined itself in terms of its products and services, and its mission as turning these into profits. Its only allegiance was to its shareholders and managers. Customers were an afterthought, perhaps a necessary evil, who existed solely to buy the company’s products. The role of the company was to make and sell its products, and the role of the customer was to acquire and pay for them. Of course, companies masked their disregard for customers behind such politically correct slogans as "The customer is always right," but these were mere platitudes, honored more in the breach than in the observance. Needless to say, it would never cross such a company’s mind that something other than its products and services was important or that it should focus on being ETDBW.

When the modern enterprise was a new phenomenon, this self-centered view may have been appropriate. Customers were so desperate for products that they could be safely ignored. Companies found it hard enough to devise, make, sell, and deliver products without worrying about customers too. But that time is long gone. Customers now have the upper hand, and to them, you are the necessary evil. Figure and ground in the canvas of business have been reversed; your customers are now in the forefront and you have been relegated to the background. Today powerful, sophisticated, and demanding customers are willing to accommodate themselves neither to your products nor to how you do business. Customers no longer exist to buy your products; you exist to solve your customers’ problems. The company that remains self- rather than customer-centric cannot endure.

Of course, many companies—maybe yours—will assert with a straight face that they are indeed customer-focused. Yet in reality, these claims are empty; most companies only pay lip service to the idea. Too many managers think they have done their duty if they distribute to everyone in the company laminated wallet cards, portentously labeled Our Values, that feature the bold pronouncement "Customers are our first priority." Others issue happy-face buttons to employees and instruct them to smile radiantly at customers. Still others believe that an expanded customer service department with an 800 number and a Web site will solve all problems. Needless to say, none of these rituals accomplishes anything. The concept of "customer focus" cannot be slapped on like a new coat of paint over a product-centric company. It requires rethinking the company, its mission, and its operations in customer terms. It requires that companies experience themselves from their customers’ perspective, then redesign how they work accordingly.

Treating a malady first requires recognizing it. If your company is one of the many that is far from easy to do business with, you are most likely hearing these complaints from your customers:

• It is confusing to have to interact with so many different people.
• You are inflexible and force everyone to accommodate to a single way of doing business with you.
• You are reactive and unprepared, acting surprised when customers ask you for something.
• You force customers to maneuver many parts of your company to get anything done.
• You impose overhead burdens on customers by making them interact with you repeatedly and check up on the work you do for them.
• Most important, you don’t seem to know or care about what truly matters to customers.

Sound familiar? Fortunately, there are six specific corresponding ways to address and counteract these six common laments and thereby become decidedly ETDBW.

Back to Table of Contents