Where's Your Customer?

After being married for over a decade, it was finally time for my wife and I to buy bedroom furniture. Since we got together, we had been making do with what we already owned, but time was up—our backs were craving a new mattress.

Walking through the mall, we happened to see a bed we liked on sale for half-price in a well-known American furniture shop. So, we took the plunge and decided to buy not just the bed but the matching side tables and dresser too. Needless to say, we were excited by our new purchase and began counting down the days until delivery.

Unfortunately, the excitement didn’t last long. When I climbed into our new bed the night it arrived, something struck me: the mattress felt noticeably different to the one we had tested in-store. Not wanting to sway my wife’s opinion, I kept my thoughts to myself, but the next morning she too commented on the very same thing.

It was then that our youngest daughter pulled the sheets back and read the mattress tag. To our dismay, it had not been made in the US, but just a few miles from our home! When we brought this to the store’s attention, their response was somewhat defensive, “You didn’t ask us where it came from” they pointed out.

The comment bemused me. I never dreamed that I would need to ask a retailer if their products were the same as those in their other stores internationally. I mean, what’s the point of a franchise if you sell different products of different quality depending on the location? When we bought our bedroom furniture, I thought we were shopping at a global retailer—it was their name on the storefront after all—yet the store informed us that their local agent only used locally made mattresses.

Shocked by the discovery, I wrote to the global CEO raising my concern and asking for a US-made replacement, or a refund. Once again, I received an unsatisfactory reply, apologizing for the disappointment but justifying their policy of selling different, locally made products. The quality, they insisted, was exactly the same.

To put that to the test, I decided to send a picture of our new bed and ask which of the US store’s mattresses was the equivalent. The point, however, was completely lost. Instead of addressing my query, the store chose to focus on their own process and disregard me, the customer, entirely. “Let me dig into this a bit more. I want to make sure the mattresses are being marketed properly,” was the response.

I spend my days with CEOs and chairmen of some of the world’s largest companies and I would certainly advise them to “dig a bit more” to quote this American franchise. But, I would also urge them to solve the customer’s problem.

To you as a company, the system is important, but to the customer, their concern is paramount. That was certainly the case for my wife and I. With each night that we climbed into our new bed and slept on an inferior mattress, our irritation grew.

Thankfully, our frustration and discomfort were short lived. The store’s decision to “dig into it” led them to realize that the mattress was, in fact, an inferior product. It was then, without a leg to stand on, that they began to address our concern and offered a refund.

The irony is that after refunding our mattress, we ended up buying one from the Four Seasons, a hotelier that decided to sell its mattresses because guests liked them so much. I’m sure the first time a hotel guest wanted to buy a mattress from them, it wasn’t part of their process, but customer satisfaction is their backbone. Is it yours?

By all means dig into your processes, but put the customer first. You can always fix a process in the background, but you’ll never satisfy the customer that way.

Printed originally in Gulf News (28 May 18)

A thinker, speaker, and writer to the core, Dr. Tommy holds a doctorate in strategic leadership from Regent University, and is the founder of EMLC where he is the region's leading CEO Coach. In addition to writing a number of books—including the Amazon #1 best-seller, Leadership Dubai Style and 10 Tips for Leading in the Middle East, Dr. Tommy is the editor-in-chief of Emerging Markets Business—The Authoritative Review.

Follow me on twitter @tommyweir or visit www.tommyweir.com for more of my thoughts on leadership.